OKNA ROSTA posters, also known as ROSTA, were designed between late 1919 and late 1921 during and immediately after the Russian Civil War. ROSTA was the name of the Russian Telegraph Agency founded in 1918. Several artists helped produce these posters, including Mayakovsky, who was responsible for their style and layout, and Mikhail Cheremnykh. They depicted texts and scenes addressing an audience of workers with a view toward recruiting support for the fledgling Soviet state. The ROSTA windows were designed to relate a story. The posters have a specific format and feature successive scenes with cartoons and texts about a certain subject.
A template system was used to produce the posters manually. They were soon replicated via a stencil machine and put up all over Moscow and in many other cities as well. The speed at which the ROSTA posters were produced made them a much faster and more effective means of communication than ordinary posters, which took at least a few days to produce and longer in some cases.
In the 1920s this ROSTA style was followed by other styles, and the focus shifted to the effectiveness of certain images.
Previously, the IISH had two ROSTA posters. The purchase of two series from an American antiquarian bookseller has added ten more posters to the collection.
Text was taken from On the Waterfront - newsletter of the Friends of the IISH Issue 13 (pdf, 1.35 Mb).