Stalin poster of the week 72 (SPotW72)

Viktor Deni and Nikolai Dolgorukov, We’ve got a Metro!, 1935

Viktor Deni and Nikolai Dolgorukov (Виктор Дени и Николай Долгоруков), We’ve got a Metro! (есть метро!), 1935

Following on from last week’s poster (SPotW71), this poster, once again by graphic duo Viktor Deni and Nikolai Dolgorukov, employs the same caption and addresses the same theme – the opening of the newly built Metro in Moscow.


The poster uses some of the same photographic components as the other poster on this theme, but here places more emphasis on the commuters than on images of the Metro itself.

Lazar Kaganovich may have been the designer and chief engineer on the Metro project, but it is Stalin who must be thanked first

Stalin is brought down from the top of the poster and into the picture plane with Lazar Kaganovich, designer and chief builder of the Metro, and the other commuters. However, Stalin is pictured as larger than Kaganovich, and walks slightly ahead, indicating his preeminent place in the hierarchy of obligation.


Despite the fact that the building of the Metro had been achieved only through the almost superhuman efforts of the workers involved, including large numbers of volunteers, the Metro was presented as a gift to the people from the State, with Stalin presented as the ultimate benefactor of the Soviet population.

The underground tunnels were an exceptional feat of Soviet engineering, executed with the help of volunteer labour.

The Metro stations were both a triumph of Soviet construction, and a form of cultural palace for the common people, bringing both convenience and beauty into everyday life.


Metro stations are large, lavish, and ornate, with marble walls, sculptures, mosaics, and enormous chandeliers.


The stations were designed to inspire awe, and to make tangible to the ordinary citizen the monumental achievements of the Soviet Union under Stalin.


As Kaganovich,  said in 1935, the Metro “went far beyond . . . the typical understanding of a technological construction. Our metropolitan is a symbol of the new socialist society being built.”

Maiakovskii Metro Station. CC image by Szabolcs Vörös, Columns at Moscow metro’s Mayakovskaya station, 1 August 2014, 17:01:02

In ‘A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization’,* Andrew Jenks describes the overall effect of one of the most beautiful of the Metro stations, named for the poet Vladimir Maiakovskiĭ:

In 1938 the chief artist for Moscow’s Mayakovski metro station urged Muscovites, “Raise your head, citizens, and you will see the sky.” Forty meters below the surface, Soviets would find images “preparing them for labor and defense.” Nearly three dozen cupolas crowned the top of a 155-meter-long platform dressed in stainless steel, Stalin’s favorite material. Each tile mosaic showed idealized scenes from a day in Soviet life: blast furnaces belched flames and carbon gases into the night sky, Red Army planes rumbled in formation, lithe athletes leaped into action, a parachutist tumbled down toward the viewer. To see the mosaics a passenger had to stand directly underneath them and gaze skyward. Heads permanently cocked back and eyes fixed on a heaven of Soviet power: this was the preferred pose for a citizen in Stalinist society, a pose inscribed in the design of the Moscow metro.

The electrification of the system and stations, always highlighted in Soviet propaganda on industrialisation, was very technologically advanced for its time – “Soviet lighting would outshine London’s, 50 lux to 24 lux.”**


The stations were also designed to promote the socialist message through the creation of a sacred Soviet space that induced reverence. Jenks likens the atmosphere to that of a church: “Ornamental elements helped transform the first line’s thirteen stations into a working Bolshevik church of modernity, offering Soviet communion on every ride.”***



Although Metro stations were named after several deceased heroic figures, Stalin was the only living man in Soviet history to have a Metro station named after him.


*Andrew Jenks. ‘A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization.’ Technology and Culture, Vol. 41, No. 4, Oct., 2000, pp. 697-724, p.699.
**Andrew Jenks. ‘A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization.’ Technology and Culture, Vol. 41, No. 4, Oct., 2000, pp. 697-724, p.710.
***Andrew Jenks. ‘A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization.’ Technology and Culture, Vol. 41, No. 4, Oct., 2000, pp. 697-724, p.708.