Soviet ad celebrating petty bourgeois resurgence

According to Farranger, a LiveJournal commenter, this 1925 Soviet advertisement "is an ad indicative of the goods available to citizens in the wake of Lenin's New Economic Policy, which allowed small shops to reopen and for petty commerce."

Also (and it must be said): that young man appears to be consummating unnatural relations with the Flatiron building.

Soviet ad 1925

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McProf

Soviet Agriculture policies in the 1920s were still relatively market oriented. This set the stage for Stalin’s crushing collectivization. As another commenter noted, in the early 1930s, millions of Ukrainians were starved to death. This was the first of a series of killing policies in the region Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands–a region stretching from Ukraine to Poland and the Baltic states in which some 14 million people–mostly women, children and the elderly–were deliberately killed not by war but by conscious policy. Most of the killings of the Holocaust took place in these lands. Snyder’s new book, Bloodlands, has been out about a week, but is extraordinary. An excellent overview is available free here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jul/16/holocaust-the-ignored-reality/
alllie

Imagine a world where people aren’t continually bombarded with ads luring them into buying, buying, buying, a world where an ad is an anomaly.

Hard to imagine.
Antinous / Moderator

A comrade with a pantry full of sausages is a comrade with a smile on his face.
gjardharr

It says “Nowhere but in Mosselprom” (a state-run department store).
twistedmystery

Those are some seriously happy folks.
Anonymous

That’s interesting.

There seems to be some kind of petty bourgeois resurgence in Japan these days — Datsusara, ex-Salaryman.
chaik

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Anonymous

Who’s the superhero-ish dude in the center, Captain Russia?
- Anonymous
  
  @Anon#6 – The dude is Cheka, predecessor to KGB.
  - rebdav
    
    When Cheka smiles you smile, that pistol on his hip has hundreds of file marks for those who didn’t.
benher

Sigh… you know, if you’re going to put something like “that young man appears to be consummating unnatural relations with the Flatiron building.” you might as well close comments as there will be no more room for us to make inappropriate jokes.
Anonymous

i remember the building:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/westphalen/5053292667/
Anonymous

It’s this building: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0

And all of Mosselprom’s advertising slogans (‘nowhere but at mosselprom!’ and the ones that were on the products as well) were written by this rather famous guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Mayakovsky
Chentzilla

Cory has chosen to reproduce a wrong comment, and added his own ignorance to it. Mosselprom isn’t a small shop, but a state-run department store (as noted above), and the building isn’t Flatiron, but, well, Mosselprom.
Anonymous

the building is in Moscow, Kalashny Lane, 2/10 (near 18, Vozdvizhenka) – Mosselprom Building (1923)
and the phrase is by the famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
Mark Crummett

Is that a department store or are you just happy to have met your five-year goal?
rebdav

Hooray!! food for Muscovites while Ukraine the great Soviet wheat exporter starves at NKVD gunpoint!