Pictures of Russian Leaders in Foreign Advertising

From fastcult’s LiveJournal:

Lenin and Stalin in foreign advertising

“In the green oak tree, in the great outdoors, two bright falcons chatted. Everyone recognised thise falcons: the first falcon was Lenin, the second falcon was Stalin“, a famous song goes, with Mikhail Isakovskiy’s lyrics. (You’ll know the poet’s other songs: “Katyusha”, “The enemy have burned down our hut”, “Oh, viburnum flowers.”) These “falcons” haunt the advertising industry. And it’s not just advertising: the artists Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst have also made works based on these “falcons.”

“Well, it’s not like that. Usually, the victim is an innocent”. Public safety advertising. Campaigning for road safety.

Stalin in a rock group

“Don’t let them decide what music you listen to.” A radio station advert. As you’ll have noticed, Stalin is playing in a group made up of dictators.

Stalin AIDS

Public safety advertising. “AIDS is a mass murderer”

[Note: this image was previously featured in this chinaSMACK post]

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An interesting public safety campaign against prostate cancer: grow a moustache if you support research into this disease. “Moustaches make a difference”.

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Another social advert. Wearing fur is bad, very bad.

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A vodka advert about Stalin Claus. Six stages of filtering. That’s how you get Santa Claus from Stalin.

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Here’s Lenin in an advert: he’s advertising a communist history museum.

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And Stalin advertising this museum.

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[T]he “Red Lenin” (1987) picture by Andy Warhol (1928-1987). It belonged to the disgraced oligarch Boris Berezovsky (1946-2013). It was sold at an auction at Christie’s for almost $75,000.

Here’s “a painting” by one of the most expensive living British artists, Damien Hirst (born 7th June 1965). I’ll explain the quotation marks.

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The story of the painting is as fallows: a journalist had a painting of Stalin hanging on his wall for a long time. Then, he decided to sell it, because he’d had enough of it. A famous auction house told him that “we don’t sell Hitlers or Stalins”. The journalist protested, “didn’t you sell the portrait of Mao that Warhol did?”. They replied that well, it was a Warhol. The journalist said that in that case, he would go to the famous artist Damien Hurst to spice up Stalin‘s portrait. Hurst agreed, and painted a red dot next to Stalin‘s nose.

The painting sold for nearly $200,000 dollars.

Comments from fastcult’s LiveJournal:

grehg_simmens:

Fantastic!

shaherezada:

Thanks, not many people have seen these

kazaktmo:

We need to make adverts for condoms with pictures of Franklin Roosevelt on the packaging, and toilet paper with Margaret Thatcher’s profile on.

tommy15101970: (responding to above)

Yes, a thousand times over!

sirius67: (also responding to previous commenter)

And George Bush on condoms

classiks:

… And the third one’s a crane called Putin

tommy15101970:

Bullshit! We need to… well, the previous commenter has said it all. It’s time to forget about Mr. Moustachio and Lispy, and if their detractors want to bring them to life in their pictures, well they’re just scratching their own little itch there.

bolshoy_ru: (responding to above)

For those that make the adverts, the itch is: it needs to be original, recognisable, and memorable.

tommy15101970: (responding to above)

To put it shortly: INTRUSIVE. It’s not themselves that they’re annoying when they’re watching TV.

bolshoy_ru: (responding to above)

No. What you’ve said isn’t the problem, it’s the lack of professionalism. The only thing that annoys me on TV is that every month I have to pay for it, and it takes a lot of time to cancel it.

manneken_piss:

Great, I’ve not seen anything like these.

larionov1945:

The first bitch is Lenin, the second bitch is Stalin.

tommy15101970: (responding to previous commenter)

The third, Nikolai II wasn’t a bitch, but an idiot who shat all over the country and the government. And if it hadn’t been that bitch Stalin, it would have been that ABSOLUTE bitch Leon Trotsky.

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