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One of the last highlights of the Soviet avant-garde, designed by an avid promoter but soon victim of the Soviet regime.

The poster “The working-plan must not only be carried out, but surpassed” was created by Lev Peisakhovich Viazmenskii ​​(1901−38) in 1930, at the height of the USSR’s Five-year plan for industrialisation and faster economic development (1928-1933). The Party authorities employed dozens of artists to create motivational art encouraging Soviets to work harder in order to overachieve the State goals (which were indeed reached a year earlier, in 1932). Viazmenskii’s poster was among the most successful ones, distributed widely and transformed into postcards, such as the present example.

The poster’s motto is translated to English and German on the back of the postcard, which is indicated not only in Russian “pochtovaia kartochka”, but also in Esperanto “poŝta karto”, highlighting the international nature of the workers’ movement. The poster itself bears features of the daring experiments of the Soviet avant-garde (unconventional composition, contrasting colours and the text laid in diagonals), even though starting from 1929, Stalin began radical changes of the State economic and ideological policies, imposing artistic standards of socialist realism rather than formalism. In 1932, the Politburo created the Artists’ and Writers’ Unions of the USSR, shutting down smaller independent artistic groups and thus terminating all expressions of avant-garde creativity.

In his early career, Viazmenskii was an ardent supporter of the regime: in 1919, he served as a volunteer in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army; in 1921 he joined the Communist Party, and then actively participated in the Association of Artists of the Revolution, advocated for the unification of artists on the basis of political engagement and created monumental murals for mass audiences, propaganda paintings and collective brigade work. In 1938, he was sentenced to death penalty on charges of belonging to a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist terrorist organisation.