ROSTA
ROSTA ( Russian РОСТА ) was the Revolutionary News Agency of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union as well as the main political administration and the educational institution of the People's Commissariat for Education. ROSTA emerged from the merger of the Petrograd Telegraph Agency (PTA, before 1914 St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency, SPTA) and the official press office to form the "Central Authority of the Russian Telegraph Agency" (Российское телеграфное агентстое агентстто) in 1918 now under the name »Rosta«. It was under the direction of Boris Malkin from 1918 to 1921 .
In 1925 it was replaced by TASS .
For propaganda purposes , ROSTA had, among other things, posters , so-called ROSTA windows , designed by Soviet avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky , in order to display them in showcases or empty shop windows . Due to the oversized dimensions, these ROSTA windows could not be reproduced by machine, so they were created by hand with the help of templates. After the artist's drawing, a template was created for each color, which was placed on the poster board and rolled over with paint, this process then had to be repeated for each color. Once a window was reached in Moscow, the stencils were sent to other cities, where they were then used again. The production and the pressure to have to react to current conditions required a simple graphic design, which was often very flat.
For the design of most of the ROSTA windows, the orientation towards the Lubki , the traditional Russian picture arches, was decisive ; in order to also reach the less educated sections of the population. The design specifications therefore included a fixed scrolling, symbolic to stereotypical representations and concise texts, which were mostly written in catchy rhymes. It was not uncommon to find humorous depictions of the topics dealt with.
Individual evidence
- ^ Roman Jakobson: My Futurist Years . Marsilio Publishers, New York, pp. 296 .