“Tobacco is Poison!”: Soviet-Era Anti-Smoking Posters

The Third All-Russia Congress of Soviet Workers met in Petrograd (later Leningrad) in January 1918. A formal photograph of the event shows about two hundred attendees, most standing on the main fl oor of the meeting hall, others behind the two-tiered podium on the speakers’ platform. One might expect to see, at the front of the hall, a huge banner proclaiming “Workers of the World, Unite!” Instead, the one banner draped across the front of the podium presents the admonition “Prosiat ne kurit’”—“Please don’t smoke.”1