ABSTRACT
The advertisements created by the Rodchenko-Mayakovsky collaboration contributed to a new symbolic system and discourse about the meaning of material goods in a collectivist society and the role they could play in fashioning the new Soviet Man and Woman. The invention of new symbols, words, and rituals during times of revolutionary upheaval is, of course, integral to revolution. The philosophies of Arvatov and the Constructivists complemented the political stance that many Bolsheviks adopted during the NEP era, when they endeavoured to build socialism peacefully and gradually transform the population through persuasion and education. Rodchenko and Mayakovsky also produced a series of advertisements for the state retailing firm, GUM. This series of ads represented the state as cultural arbiter and the products it sold as active agents of human transformation, thus making a direct connection between individual acts of consumption and the transformation of the economy, culture, and human beings.
