Taking Place: Visual Agitation in the Soviet Rural Periphery

This article explores the paradoxes of Soviet visual propaganda in the Russian rural North, using a 1965 incident in the Vologda region as a starting point. It highlights the tension between centrally issued policies and blueprints of visual propaganda, and the harsh rural realities that clashed with utopian socialist aspirations. The authors draw on regional and central Russian archives to examine how rural ideology workers dealt with this tension, and investigate the ways in which propaganda was shaped by geography, infrastructure, and local audiences. The article concludes that efforts to visually mark remote areas as Soviet often emphasised, rather than erased, the dissonance between ideology and everyday life.