Between Humour and Public Commentary: Digital Re-appropriation of the Soviet Propaganda Posters as Internet Memes

Introduction

As vital components of former Soviet politics and culture, propaganda posters re-emerged on the Internet alongside other poignant symbols of communist epoch. Bold and colourful, these former carriers of communist ideology today have changed their not only original meaning and function but also ‘habitat’: they moved from the walls of physical buildings to digital space of virtual communities, social networks and online games. Thus, Soviet posters have been re-adapted for a variety of uses on the Web, including anything from commenting on a current agenda in a news blog to creating a personal profile on ‘VKontakte’. Furthermore, some of these images reached increasingly high popularity so that they became ‘viral’, and now, like ‘viruses’, they spread around the virtual space (Burgess, 2008; Guadagno, Rempala, Murphy, & Okdie, 2013). In this way, the same poster can travel across different media platforms, whereupon it can also ‘get transformed, repurposed, or distorted’ and mixed with other digital contents (Jenkins, 2009a) as it passes from one digital venue to another.

This article examines creative re-appropriation of the Soviet propaganda posters as Internet memes. In what follows, I argue that due to the highly recognizable graphic form, today these images have been turned into ‘templates’ for meme-making. However, it is not only the visual structure of these posters that urges users to convert them into memes but also the context of contemporary Russian culture, which incorporates and tends to ‘recycle’ different elements of the Soviet heritage. After identifying the basic ‘memetic’ qualities of Soviet propaganda posters, I proceed to analysis of their functioning on the Russian Internet. Particularly, I identify the two functions of memes based on the Soviet propaganda posters: first, as a form of a peculiar humour, known in Russian tradition as stiob and, second, as an instrument for voicing of public opinion, through which users comment on urgent political and social issues.

The Structure and Functioning of Digital Memes

Although an Internet meme is a relatively recent phenomenon (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007), it is already an established concept in the context of several subject fields, such as media, visual culture, historical and political sciences. Thus, contemporary researchers acknowledge the importance of an Internet meme upon studying it from different analytical angles (Makhortykh, 2015; Milner, 2013a, 2013b; Shifman, 2014a; Wiggins, 2016), while some scholars examine it as a fully fledged genre, inherent to online communication (Denisova, 2016; Wiggins & Bowers, 2014). Most broadly, an Internet meme is defined as a ‘catchy idea’ that circulates online through images, texts, videos, tunes or other digital ‘stuff’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 201). As a ‘contagious’ unit of information, an Internet meme spreads quickly among users, and in this way, it ‘generates and shapes mindsets and significant forms of behavior and actions of a social group’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 199).

Shifman (2014a, p. 7–8) provides a comprehensive definition of Internet memes, as she characterises them as ‘(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users’. This description highlights the basic principles of digital memes. First, these elements of ‘participatory’ digital culture (Jenkins, 2009a) gain significance through rapid dissemination, replication and proliferation on the Web so that they reach a certain degree of ‘virality’ (Burgess, 2008). Thus, for instance, an image can become a meme only if it propagates around digital networks in numerous copies. Secondly and related to the first, as a series of interconnected units, memes have common features, which can be common text, icon, stance or even idea. Without at least one of these shared qualities, the emergence and further iteration of a meme is impossible. Thirdly, memes spread through imitation and remixing: the two techniques prevalent in online environments (Jenkins, 2009a, 2009b; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Miekle, 2016; Shifman, 2013; Wiggins & Bowers, 2014). In fact, the practice of remixing helps keeping a meme ‘alive’ on the Internet for a relatively long period ‘due to the dynamic interaction among members of participatory digital culture’ (Wiggins & Bowers, 2014, p. 7), who can modify, merge, recombine and reorder different parts of a ‘memetic’ pattern. As Burgess (2008, p. 102) indicates, through ‘reuse, reworking and redistribution’, a spreadable media item attracts new audiences ‘to the extent that it acts as a hub for further creative activity by a wide range of participants in [the] social network’.

One particular function that memes fulfil in contemporary culture is mocking all subjects, for instance, our daily life, current political issues, historical events or famous personalities. Undoubtedly, a great portion of Internet memes exists for the sake of fun. They entertain users through playfulness and absurd ideas that carry either ‘a little [of] “serious” content’, or no seriousness at all (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 217). In recent studies of ‘memetics’, scholars identify humour as a key feature that helps memes to achieve popularity on the Internet (Berger & Milkman, 2012; Denisova, 2016; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Radchenko, 2013; Shifman, 2014a). According to Shifman (2014a, p. 66), humorous memes constitute a prevailing category of digital memes due to users’ tendency to share comical, laughable items, which ‘make others feel good’.

While digital memes are commonly presented in a form of joke, they can, at the same time, play the role of ‘serious’ media transmitting important social, political, ideological and cultural messages across general public (Dean, 2019; Fang, 2018; Lukianova, Shteynman, & Fell, 2019). Vernacular nature of memes allows using them as a tool of communication by different groups and on various occasions that range from criticism of dominant power to anonymous telling about personal traumatic experiences (Fang, 2018; Vickery, 2018). In his study of ‘toad worship memes’, Fang (2018) explores how the same category of digital memes may represent both political counter-discourse and the new type of Netspeak appropriated by wider audience, who may not necessarily be interested in political issues. Dean (2019) insists that active circulation of memes (and other shareable visual content) in contemporary public sphere results in so-called ‘memeification’ of politics: a trend inherent to modern political communication. Taking the semiotic approach, Lukianova et al. (2019) analyses memes as a code and artificial language that conveys, alongside socially significant information, also myths created purposely by political parties.

Acting as participatory units of communication, digital memes unite people in groups, promoting different ideologies, collective identities, mindset, cultural values and aesthetic preferences (Douglas, 2014; Fang, 2018; Katz & Shifman, 2017; Literat & van den Berg, 2019; Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2017). According to Nissenbaum and Shifman (2017, p. 485), memes fulfil a consolidating function, as they constitute a cultural base, ‘around which communities gather and act’. Knowing a meme and its implication thus enables a user to become a part of a broader community, distinguished by its own rules and formulas of behaviour (Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2017). For instance, considering China’s context, Fang (2018, p. 13) suggests that the distribution of ‘toad worship memes’ creates a specific ‘bonding effect’ among dissidents and regime critics, who use such memes to reinforce political opposition. Another example is the ‘Confession Bear’ meme, which due to its transgressive appropriation gathers anonymous crowds of individuals disclosing ‘disturbing secrets, such as confessions of rape, abuse, addiction, suicide, and violence’ (Vickery, 2018, p. 10). Furthermore, even those memes that do not have the intended social or political meaning can induce a sense of communal belonging; as Katz and Shifman (2017, p. 825) indicate, the ‘digital memetic nonsense’ – ‘clusters of seemingly meaningless digital texts imitated and circulated by many participants’ – ‘may potentially serve as a social glue that bonds members of phatic, image-oriented, communities’.

Methodology

The search, selection and sampling of digitally transformed Soviet propaganda posters involved several stages. During the initial phase, I did a preliminary screening of the Russian Internet through the Yandex search engine (which is adapted to the Russian language and, thus, delivers more results for Russian queries than Google) upon entering keywords ‘Soviet propaganda posters memes’ (sovetskie agitatsionnye plakaty memy), ‘Soviet propaganda remakes’ (sovetskie agitatsionnye plakaty peredelannye), ‘Soviet propaganda posters jokes’ (sovetskie agitatsionnye plakaty prikoly) and ‘Soviet propaganda posters funny pictures’ (sovetskie agitatsionnye plakaty smeshnye kartinki). Each of the search criteria generated over two million results, what attested to the fact that Russian-speaking users were actively engaged in modifying and re-interpreting Soviet propaganda posters.

The second stage was aimed at detecting of the most ‘memetic’ posters. Although over the period from the October Revolution in 1917 until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the Soviet propaganda machine had produced hundreds of images, for the purposes of this study, it was important to locate those pictures that reached a certain degree of ‘virality’ on the Russian Internet. To this end, I addressed several popular (among Russian audience) meme-generator websites, such as ‘Meme-arsenal’, ¹ ‘MemesMix’, ² ‘Risovach’ ³ and ‘1001mem’. ⁴ Searching these websites for meme templates, I discovered that the following posters were most frequently re-appropriated as ‘image macros’ (Kligler-Vilenchik & Thorson, 2016): Motherland is Calling! (1941) by Irakli Toidze, Do not Talk! (1941) by Nina Vatolina and Nikolai Denisov, Did you Volunteer? (1920) by Dmitri Moor and No! (1954) by Viktor Govorkov (see the former three posters at^5,6,7). At this stage of research, I delimited the scope of my empirical material only to the former three posters, as they fell within the same category of wartime posters. All the three circulated widely during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), including Did you Volunteer?, which was originally created on the occasion of the Civil War waged between the Whites and Reds in 1917–1921 (Kenez, 1999, p. 34).

During the third stage, I focused solely on the above-named wartime posters. Since my interest laid in visual transformation of those images, I excluded plain ‘image macros’ that did not contain any graphic alteration apart from a changing caption. Instead, I collected around 50–60 visual remakes of each poster from informal online communities and fandom platforms like ‘Demiart’, ⁸ ‘Absurdopedia’ ⁹ and ‘Netlore’, ¹⁰ where users randomly posted such pictures. Samples of modified Do not Talk! Did you Volunteer? and Motherland is Calling! were also retrieved via regular keyword search on Yandex.^11,12,13 Upon gathering the transformed posters, I defined contexts of their appropriation through Yandex ‘image search’ function (analogue to Google ‘image search’), which showed the exact location of those memes. For instance, the same visual derivative of Do not Talk! simultaneously appeared on a portal devoted to poetry, ¹⁴ a community for selling cars ¹⁵ and even as an avatar of a commentor in a popular blog. ¹⁶ Thus, I traced how remakes of the wartime posters ‘migrated’ across online space, as they were repurposed to different media platforms, digital formats and topics. The search through images on Yandex brought additional samples of digitally modified posters; however, at this stage, I eliminated the items that did not belong to the Russian segment of the Internet but, for instance, attributed to domains of other former Soviet republics.

Having sampled the visually transformed Soviet propaganda posters, I applied methods of multimodal analysis to the group of selected representations (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Pearce et al., 2018). Based on semiotics, the multimodal approach suggests probing a digital meme as a multimodal construct containing four layers of signification: discourse, design, production and distribution (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). The four dimensions are equally important for contemporary communication; however, they gain especial importance when studying memes, which have a great communicative potential in the digital environment. Firstly, on the level of discourse, a meme can be seen as ‘a way that people insert themselves into a public conversation’ on a topical subject (Kligler-Vilenchik & Thorson, 2016, p. 1997). Remakes of the Soviet propaganda posters, as will be seen further in this article, can be fitted to any discourse related to Russian power, legislation, international relations, current social or economic order. Secondly, on the level of design, the Soviet propaganda poster-based memes present ‘old’ signs that have been extracted from the Soviet epoch in order to now make new signs associated with the present time. Thirdly, the level of production requires examining ‘technical’ structure of a medium (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), which in case of ‘image macro’ memes is their visual composition. In the following section of the article, I analyse the visual organisation of the Soviet wartime propaganda posters, as I explicate features that make those posters ‘memetic’. Finally, the level of distribution implies scrutinising networks and platforms where memes spread, and this level requires understanding how users receive and re-interpret memes in the process of communication.

‘Memetic’ Power of the Soviet Wartime Propaganda Posters

During such intense and turbulent period of Soviet history as the Second World War, the state propaganda was of utmost importance (Welch, 2017). As Berkhoff (2012, p. 4) notes, in the battle against Nazi Germany, mobilisation of the entire population, soldiers and workers in particular, became the Soviet media’s paramount official goal. In this regard, posters – inevitable media of visual propaganda – played a pivotal role in the consolidation of the country, in ‘influencing people’s perception of the war, of what [was] at stake in it’ (Edele, 1991, p. 91). These graphic signs carried the ideological message of the government to the entire nation, and they did so in an efficient, comprehensible manner. Citing Edele (1991), who conducts a close analysis of Soviet wartime propaganda, I suggest that wartime posters stand out from other posters produced in the USSR. I assume that it is because of their visual structure that such posters are now widely appropriated as digital memes, and this is why the three above-mentioned posters—Motherland is Calling!, Do not Talk! and Did you Volunteer?—are ‘viral’ on the Web.

The core distinction of the wartime posters lay in their visual representation. In other words, these posters differed from their predecessors [for instance, from the early Bolshevik posters (Bonnell, 1999)] in terms of how and what they portrayed. It was their composition, style and depicted subjects that were distinctive. In this regard, Edele (1991) observes that wartime iconography was extremely powerful, as it was polysemic. It included ‘strongly polyvalent symbols, which were open to many different “readings”’ (Edele, 1991, p. 90). As Edele (1991, p. 90) maintains, ‘artists […] learned to employ’ the ‘adaptable’ icons in such posters to make them relevant to all social groups. This involved multi-vocal generalised images of Soviet Motherland, heroism or victimhood that, due to their generality, ‘allowed a wide variety of interpretations’ (Edele, 1991, pp. 98–99). For instance, ever since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the notion of Motherland (Rodina) prevailed in the state discourse as an affectionate concept symbolising ‘many things and thus something different in each citizen’s imagination’ (Berkhoff, 2012, p. 6). As the term Rodina was consistently capitalised in official documents, it meant much more than the words ‘land’ (strana) or ‘fatherland’ (otechestvo) for its countrymen: Rodina demanded unconditional love, unquestioning fidelity and, if necessary, a sacrifice of one’s own life on the battlefield (Berkhoff, 2012, p. 206, 272). Consequently, the image of Motherland on Motherland is Calling! (Rodina-mat’ zovet!) poster appealed to everyone, upon calling on one to protect the sacred – one’s mother, family and children. Any Soviet citizen, without exception, could have related himself or herself to this poster because of its polysemy and association with general human values.

What makes Soviet wartime propaganda posters ‘memetic’ today is, firstly, their simple and highly recognisable graphic form, ideally fitting for producing ‘image macros’ (see, for instance, Did you Volunteer?, Do not Talk! and Motherland is Calling! used as ‘image macros’ at^17,18 and ¹⁹ ). Since the original purpose of these posters was sending an ideological message from the government to the entire Soviet population, they had to be simple and understandable to everyone. The design of such a poster is rather concise. As a rule, it contains one big ‘polyvalent’ icon (Edele, 1991, p. 91) accompanied by a short catchy caption or text. No other complicated or unnecessary elements obstruct the composition, enabling a viewer to get a message directly, without thinking too much. An example is the famous wartime poster Do not Talk! (1941), which now spawns numerous digital derivatives (see examples of Do not Talk! memes at ²⁰ ). The structure of this poster is straightforward: it centres on the figure of a woman who holds her finger close to her lips in a gesture of silence. Apart from that, there is a sharp caption ‘Do not talk!’ and an explanatory text, ‘Keep your eyes open. These days even the walls have ears. Chatter and gossip go hand in hand with treason’. During communist times, no one would misinterpret this poster because of its clarity. It warned Soviet citizens against accidental leakage of national information in the period of the Second World War. Today, this poster is widely appropriated as an Internet meme, which is precisely due to the qualities of visual boldness, simplicity and concision.

Simplicity and, as a consequence, memorability are the properties that enable a meme ‘to be readily copied and passed from mind to mind relatively intact’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 201). In this regard, a simple and highly recognisable image stands a much better chance of becoming a meme than do complex, visually sophisticated pictures (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Shifman 2014a, p. 81). This explains the ‘memetic’ popularity of Soviet propaganda posters that, due to their catchy graphic form, are widely imitated and reproduced in an online environment. As bright icons of the communist epoch, these posters now ‘make intuitive sense’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 201) even to those individuals who have never lived in the former Soviet Union.

Apart from simplicity, another factor that prompts the distribution of Internet memes is an emotional charge, which can be both positive and negative depending on a situation (Berger & Milkman, 2012; Guadagno et al., 2013; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Shifman, 2014a). As recent studies show, users are more likely to spread the kind of Internet content that triggers effective response (Berger & Milkman, 2012; Guadagno et al., 2013). In other words, if someone experiences strong ‘high-arousal’ emotions of joy, anger, awe or anxiety (Berger & Milkman, 2012, pp. 194–200) about a sharable item, he or she most probably will share it too. Emotional contagion (Guadagno et al., 2013, p. 2312) drives users to replicate and forward particular videos, images and texts that may circulate in thousands or even millions of digital copies.

Proliferation of Soviet propaganda posters on the Web stems from popular sentiment. As Russian citizens cannot reach a consensus about the meaning of their recent history, they express a range of different contradictory feelings towards everything Soviet, be it former Soviet lifestyle, politics or culture. Russians do not stay neutral when remembering life in the former USSR, even if some of them never had a first-hand experience of living under communism (Nikolayenko, 2008). While humour, sympathy, pride, scepticism and even frustration prevail in public discussion of the Soviet past, it is the sense of nostalgia that urges Russian users to spread the Soviet-related material on the Web (Kalinina & Menke, 2016; Rajagopalan, 2019). According to Kalinina and Menke (2016, p. 60), nostalgic longing stimulates people ‘to participate in the sharing and negotiation of history, memories and national identity’. In this regard, nostalgia acts as an affective force that motivates individuals on active remembering of collective past through commenting on it in blogs, creating amateur YouTube videos (Rajagopalan, 2019), building like-minded communities (Kalinina & Menke, 2016) or, as in the case under consideration, remaking of Soviet propaganda posters amidst other online activities.

Appropriated as Internet memes, the Soviet propaganda posters present an ‘affective’ content that ‘hooks’ Russian people. The latter, in their turn, seem to be receptive to these digitised elements of the Soviet official culture because of nostalgia and the sense of self-identification with some former Soviet values (Rajagopalan, 2019). However, as Rajagopalan (2019, pp. 13–14) observes, ‘this nostalgia is not a plea to return to the past’: ‘it is, rather, a comment on the present and as such it feeds identity work today’. Using the definition of Boym (2001, p. 49), this ‘reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home’ (in other words, the Soviet Union), instead, it suggests to reconsider the scattered fragments of the Soviet past by virtue of new tools and genres, such as digital memes, even though the latter often take humorous or grotesque form. Thus, Russian users become susceptible to the remakes of Soviet propaganda posters, what contributes to their ‘virality’ on the Russian Internet; as Knobel and Lankshear (2007, p. 202) note, ‘“susceptibility” refers to the “timing” or “location” of a meme with respect to people’s openness to the meme and their propensity to be infected by it’.

When employed in new digital contexts, the Soviet wartime propaganda posters acquire a range of brand new connotations. Whilst their original historical meaning is lost, they turn into ‘visual templates’ (Oushakine, 2007, p. 456) that can fit any new purpose. These posters are evoked on the Web because of their form, which is vivid and socially recognisable and which thus becomes suitable for transmission of new ideas (Oushakine, 2010, p. 414). Explaining why old Soviet signs prevail in contemporary Russian culture, Oushakine (2007, p. 453) assumes that ‘the logic of these reincarnations has more in common with the act of mechanical retrofitting (facilitated by the digital age) rather than with the process of political restoration’. As the scholar points out, ‘it is familiarity of the old form that becomes crucial’, as ‘it is a search for a recognizable image’ that often lies at the core of these symbolic re-appropriations (Oushakine, 2007, p. 453). Noteworthy, on a formal level, the visual structure of Soviet propaganda posters aligns with so-called ‘demotivational’ posters or ‘demotivators’, which is the most common memetic pattern on the Russian Internet (see examples of demotivators at ²¹ ). A demotivator consists of a catchy image, bordered in black, with a title either discouraging from doing something or diminishing someone’s significance. It is precisely the act of ‘mechanical retrofitting’ described by Oushakine (2007) that enables to re-adapt the ‘old forms’ of Soviet posters to the new memetic formats and genres.

Aesthetics of stiob

Considering the case of Soviet propaganda posters transformed into digital memes, I suggest that humour is central in most of these re-appropriations. On the Web, these past images of totalitarian ideology are often subject to travesty, which does not have any particular reason, except for fun and playfulness. Yet, what distinguishes all absurd transformations of Soviet wartime propaganda posters from other digital memes is a specific type of humour that does not fit any conventional definitions of irony, sarcasm, satire or even black humour. Rather, it is a strange combination of all these categories but none of them in the pure form. Although in the English-speaking tradition, this ‘humorous’ subgenre is relatively unheard of, it is widely known in the Russian culture under the name of stiob (or steb, also possible). In the current section, I examine a ‘transformative’ potential of stiob with relation to Soviet wartime propaganda posters. Since the latter are outstanding carriers of such humour, they have been modified in a peculiar stiobbish manner that allows using and re-using them in different virtual contexts, including comic situations and ones deserving serious consideration.

It is rather difficult to give a precise definition of stiob, as the term itself has no direct translation into English. According to Dunn (2004, p. 187), the borders of stiob are somewhat blurred, and ‘it is not entirely clear what should be included under this heading’. While in Russia the word stiob is deeply rooted in language and is thus used casually, it has no equivalent in the English-speaking world, where one can only guess about its meaning. Russian-born anthropologist Yurchak (2006, p. 242, 250) characterises stiob as ‘a grotesque version of… irony’ that ‘differs from sarcasm, cynicism, derision, or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humor’. Obviously, it is an aspect of typically Russian laughter, which is contradictory, unpredictable and, partially, incomprehensible and which, due to its ambiguity, has both positive and negative connotations (Kornilov, 2015). According to Gudkov and Dubin (2009, p. 147), stiob presents a cultural provocation: an ‘intellectual pranking’ that takes a provocative or even aggressive form in its aspiration to diminish the value of symbols through placing them in the context of travesty. By contrast, Vokuev (2011) insists that stiob is not necessarily destructive; on the positive side, it can be seen as a sort of humorous self-identification and self-representation in a communication environment.

Stiob was inherent to the late Soviet and post-Soviet culture (Boym, 2001, p. 150; Yurchak, 2006). Although as an old folk-humorous tradition, it emerged in ancient Russia among buffoons and tricksters (Malykhina, 2014, p. 134), it was only during late socialism that this form of humour gained enormous popularity due to the reality of the time (Yoffe, 2013). Particularly, in the late 1970s–1980s, stiob prevailed in circles of Soviet intellectuals and non-conformist artists ‘Mit’ki’, who used it not only as an aesthetic method but also as a new ideology, lifestyle and a way of social communication (Yurchak, 2006, p. 250). From 1980s onwards, stiob permeated into a broader cultural field, as it was appropriated in Soviet literature, music and fashion and was adopted by the public at large as ‘one of the possible ways to speak and address issues’ (Yoffe, 2013, p. 213). Later, after the collapse of the USSR, stiob turned into an even more powerful cultural force, since this kind of phenomena ‘[was] likely to be particularly effective in periods of political and cultural transition, such as occurred in Russia after August 1991’ (Dunn, 2004, p. 186). As an actual sociocultural trend, today stiob spreads across the online space upon manifesting itself in genres of ‘trolling’, ‘photoshopping’ and ‘demotivators’, which, as was mentioned above, are stylistically identical to the memes of the Soviet propaganda posters (Kornilov, 2015; Vokuev, 2011).

Digital imitations of the Soviet wartime propaganda posters are poignant examples of stiob aesthetics on the Web. They represent stiob at its best, while demonstrating qualities of incongruous, intentionally bad and seemingly tasteless humour. These images continue the old yet still relevant tradition of absurd laughter that was initiated by Soviet intellectuals in the 1980s, precisely the time when the communist system showed its first cracks. For instance, found across the Russian Internet, memes of Did you Volunteer? poster look pronouncedly grotesque (see some transformations of Did you Volunteer? poster:^22,23,24). They utilise the principle of deliberate ‘mismatching’, so typical of stiob (Klebanov, 2013, p. 230). Thus, in these remakes, the original image of the Red Army man is combined with hardly compatible images of historical personalities, fictional characters and strange creatures borrowed from novels, films or cartoons. Among them are Tsar Peter the Great, writers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, French actor Gerard Depardieu, fantastic villains Davy Jones and Darth Vader and many others. When superimposed on the prominent Soviet poster, these icons look, by all means, inept; they create a sense of visual irrelevance or, as Knobel and Lankshear (2007, p. 215) call it, an effect of ‘anomalous juxtaposition’, which bemuses onlooker and makes him or her laugh and cry at the same time. Such disparity is, in fact, intrinsic to stiob. Looking back at stiob practitioners of the 1980s, Klebanov (2013, p. 243) notes that they often employed incoherence in their works, such as combining incoherent imagery with incompatible music accompaniment on purpose of instigating ‘an emotional shock among the audience: a cultural, emotional, aesthetic shock’.

Creative transformations of Do not Talk! image (see them at ²⁵ ) seem to be as absurd as those of Did you Volunteer? The depiction of a strict woman is randomly supplemented with irrelevant elements that mock the entire composition: cigars, Chupa Chups lollipops, guns, wineglasses, additional hands, wigs, hats etc. Thus, she suddenly turns into either a punk rocker or a cowboy, a hero of computer game or dr. Evil character amidst other nonsensical alterations. In this regard, stiob acts in the same way as carnival, which, according to Bakhtin’s theory, turns everything inside out upon merging the sacred with the profane, the new with the old, the wise with the foolish and the high with the low (Kornilov, 2015; Vokuev, 2011). Absurdist captions, like ‘Do not talk about street magic!’ or ‘Do not talk! Roar!’, on some of Do not Talk! memes (see^26,27) emphasise the presence of carnivalesque aesthetics that opposes any form of official seriousness. In the meantime, ‘changing’ portraits of the depicted woman on those memes (see ²⁸ ) remind of carnival masks that were typically used in Medieval folk humour rituals (Kornilov, 2015; Vokuev, 2011).

As a carnivalised form of criticism (Kugaevsky, 2006), stiob exaggerates qualities of an object, whereupon the latter acquires an unnatural and even hypertrophied shape. Importantly, stiob ‘permeates’ inside the object, thus mocking it ‘from within’ on its territory, using its own language, style and features (Kugaevsky, 2006, p. 145). In case of Soviet propaganda poster-based memes, stiob mimics the visual composition of a poster, and so, these are the icon and caption that are driven to absurdity through stiob. For example, on remakes of Do not Talk!, the representation of a woman is grotesquely modified by intention: she can roll her eyes, rub her nose or point her finger in different directions, whilst accompanied by the captions ‘Do not goggle!’, ‘Do not whistle!’, ‘Do not pick’ and other (see ²⁹ and ³⁰ ). Similarly, Did you Volunteer? memes distort both the depicted Red Army men and caption, where the latter is often changed to inept, foolish and senseless questions, such as ‘Did you call Cthulhu?’, ‘Are you yet on the dark side?’ and ‘Did you put a New Year cap on your avatar?’ (see ³¹ and ³² ). By contrast, the Motherland is Calling! poster is rarely – only in some extreme cases – subjected to stiobbish transformation, what can be explained by affectionate attitude towards the image of motherland among Russian public.

Under the effect of stiob, Soviet propaganda posters become not only incongruous but also unfamiliar and strange, as if they belonged to some other ‘unreal’ dimension, attributing neither to Russia’s present nor to its Soviet past. For instance, on a Did you Volunteer? remake, the head of the Red Army man is replaced with the pumpkin, and the caption reads ‘Are you a pumpkin?’: the stiobbish transformation appears on a game forum called ‘Haulm online’ (see ³³ ). Using the terminology of Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, the original form of these posters is ‘estranged’ to such an extent that it is now almost impossible to identify their meaning (Ginzburg, 2006). Stiob is instrumental in this regard. It deconstructs and defamiliarises the old symbol (it can be any authoritative image, text or ritual) with a view to reuse it in brand new contexts and, thus, to ‘create a new reality from the fragments of the old one’ (Rogachevskii, 2007, p. 248). This is why memes of the Soviet wartime propaganda posters can be employed almost anywhere on the Web, starting from a fandom community to a serious discussion on topical issues, as will be seen further in this article.

Public Commentary

While often having a humorous undertone, memes of the Soviet propaganda posters fulfil another function, apart from pure humour. Thus, although most of them look ludicrous and even futile, they do not exist only for the sake of fun. Paradoxically, the ironic nature of these transformed images allows using them also for ‘serious’ purposes, such as commenting on political issues, discussing hot topics of public debate and generally expressing one’s view about ‘how the world should look and the best way to get there’ (Shifman, 2014a, p. 119). In this regard, according to Milner (2013b), Internet memes act as an instrument for voicing public opinion. By sharing and modifying them, users display their attitudes towards current agenda. In this way, for instance, people can criticise modern policies or question seemingly unfair legislation, show either support or dissatisfaction with the ruling party, as well as subvert (‘troll’) dominant discourse through mockery (Denisova, 2016; Miekle, 2016, pp. 64–68), precisely through practices of stiob that were described in detail above. Internet memes are not mere tools of laughter but also tools of popular communication (Milner, 2013a; Shifman, 2014a, p. 123; Wiggins, 2016). In their funny, ‘absurd-looking’ form, they ‘house potential for populist expression and conversation’ (Milner, 2013b, p. 2360).

When I researched the corpus of Soviet propaganda poster-based memes on the Web, I discovered that the latter was often employed as a public commentary on topical issues. Thus, occasionally, these images appeared in quite unexpected places: this could be an online discussion of Russian foreign policy, or a ‘Vkontakte’ group devoted to the Second World War, a blog debating State Duma elections at ‘LiveJournal’ or an article about the 2014 Sochi Olympics on the popular news service ‘Lenta.ru’. The transformed Soviet posters appeared on these and other digital venues that allowed public commenting. Interestingly, the purpose of Soviet images on these forums was not to communicate important information about the topic but rather post such images to articulate personal views, demonstrating how users felt and what they personally thought about the discussed subject.

The Do Not Talk! poster merits a special attention in this regard. More often than other Soviet propaganda posers, it appears in online discussions of issues related to data privacy and information protection in the contemporary digital age. For instance, a few remakes of this poster spread in 2013 in light of the international scandal evoked by Edward Snowden’s revelations on global surveillance. On one of such remakes of Do not Talk!, the depiction of a woman’s face is substituted with the face of Hillary Clinton, and the caption reads ‘Hillary Clinton Warns: Do not Talk!’ (see the remake at ³⁴ ). The visual transformation aligns with the topic of entry where the poster is placed: ‘CIA launches “Honour the Oath” campaign to crack down on leaks’. User Aleksander Rokhmistrov created this entry to ponder about the campaign’s efficiency and that is to question whether such a measure would really prevent intelligence agents from disclosing the classified information. While Rokhmistrov’s discussion is playful in tone, he alludes to the Soviet period, upon stating that in the former USSR, the problem of secrecy was solved by means of visual propaganda. As Rokhmistrov notes, ‘during the Soviet time, […] almost each institution had a poster, in which a woman with a stern face claimed Do not Talk!’. ³⁵ Continuing the joke, Rokhmistrov offers his own remake of the poster (described above), as he admits that this meme is solely his personal creative initiative.

A no less notable remake of the Do not Talk! poster was created in response to the recently issued Yarovaya law, which obliged Russian operators and telecom companies to store user correspondence for a definite period of time. Also known as ‘Yarovaya package’, the package of laws caused dozens of memes, including the one based on the Soviet poster. Like in the previous case, the image of Do not Talk! is visually transformed: it shows the head of Irina Yarovaya (the creator of the law) covered with a plastic bag with a caption ‘Do not Whisper!’ and additional subtitle saying ‘“Yarovaya package” enters in force today’ (see the remake at ³⁶ and ³⁷ ). As this meme spread around different social media, it triggered heated discussions of users who argued about possible implications of the law. These online debates often took the form of a verbal ‘fight’, in which users ‘defend[ed] predefined socio-political positions rather than search[ed] for consensus’ (Rutten & Zvereva, 2013, p. 7). In fact, no one even tried to reach an agreement when discussing the new legislation, but the purpose was the opposite: to speculate on the subject, to express one’s own point of view and to prove its ‘correctness’.

From the three Soviet wartime posters, Did you Volunteer? provides the most adjustable graphic pattern, as it is ubiquitously re-appropriated in various social, political and cultural contexts. Modifications of the poster are frequently used to address economic or business matters and to promote commercial services and goods. On such memes, the interrogative caption is converted into other questions starting with ‘did you/do you/are you’, whereas the image of the Red Army man is either replaced with different characters or supplemented with additional items, like hard hats, pipes, scrolls and other professional equipment. Thus, instead of ‘Did you volunteer?’, the remakes ask ‘Did you pay all the tax?’, ‘Did you get a patent?’, ‘Did you pass attestation?’ or ‘Did you queue for new IPhone?’ (see ‘Did you get a patent?’, ³⁸ ‘Did you pass attestation?’ ³⁹ and ‘Are you ready for the World Championship?’ ⁴⁰ ). Similarly, creative transformations of the poster illustrate articles speculating about different policies and regulations. For example, the blog entry ‘Glowworms on the road: does the new traffic law apply to motorcyclists?’ at ‘Drive2.Com’ ⁴¹ involves a remake that asks ‘Did you get a signal vest?’. On this remake, apart from the caption, the image is also changed. It shows the Red Army man wearing a vest and a helmet, thus hinting on the new rule that obliges drivers to put on signal vests during emergency stops.

Unlike the Do Not Talk! or Did you Volunteer? posters, Motherland is Calling! does not have that many graphic alterations on the Internet. This is due to the power of the original image, which builds upon the omnipotent icon of Motherland so cherished by Russian people. The picture is magnetic. It presents a woman ‘in rich red clothing with one arm in the air and the other extended holding a piece of paper with “Military oath” written on it, against a background of bayonets’ (Gill, 2011, p. 144). During wartime, it was undoubtedly the most famous and powerful symbol of Rodina (literally, ‘homeland’). As Gill (2011, p. 144) notes, the female here is clearly ‘the embodiment of the country’, equalled to the notions of ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘motherhood’. During the hardest period for the USSR, this poster presented the war ‘as being fought […] on behalf of the Motherland, which connoted everything that was organic, traditional and naturally productive, including the family, particularly mothers and children’ (Simpson, 2012, p. 238). On portraying ‘a stern, heroic peasant mother’, the Motherland is Calling! poster ‘helped to entrench this feminised construct of the Soviet land in the popular imagination’ (Simpson, 2012, p. 238).

Today, due to the passage of time, Motherland is Calling! no longer serves its original function. Instead, the poster has moved into the digital field, where it produced ‘memetic’ derivatives. Although on such remakes, the depiction of Motherland itself is not changed, what is commonly modified is the ‘Military Oath’ paper, now containing new inscriptions or images. Whilst during the Great Patriotic War, Motherland is Calling! called on to protect homeland, today’s remakes of the poster are used to call on for other action: to vote for a particular candidate on elections, to sign petitions, to donate money or to join certain groups or associations (see transformations of Motherland is Calling! poster at^42,43 and ⁴⁴ ). Such memes enact as units of popular communication, through which users exchange their ideas regarding any subject whatsoever. In other words, from the former propaganda tool, the poster has been turned into a mode of creative expression.

The fact that Soviet wartime propaganda posters are used in a variety of digital contexts is not accidental. The strong, recognisable Soviet icons ‘fit’ any rules of the Web. The power of these images lies in their polysemy and that is in their openness to new readings and interpretations. Because of this, such images can accommodate new meanings (Shifman, 2014a, p. 150) and ideologies. Moreover, the digital transformation enhances and extends this ‘polysemic potential’ (Shifman, 2014a, p. 150) much further. Now that all parts of the poster can be graphically changed, it becomes even more multi-vocal. It is a complex intertextual phenomenon, containing layers of meanings, references and texts (Milner, 2013b).

Conclusion

While digital transformations of the Soviet propaganda posters do not fall within any hitherto discovered category of humorous, political or historical memes (Fang, 2018; Lukianova et al., 2019; Makhortykh, 2015; Milner, 2013b), they present a separate case of memes that recycle images of the Soviet epoch. These remakes stand out from other viral content on ‘Runet’ due to their visual structure, which rests upon bright and powerful icons produced by the Soviet artists well before the invention of the Internet. One notable advantage of such memes is a relatively long life span, with some earliest memes emerging in the middle 2000s and the latest appearing today in response to modern issues. Unlike, for instance, political memes propagating only as long as a certain event or urgent topic is in progress (Milner, 2013b), memes based on a memorable graphic artwork have a potential for greater longevity. Since images of the Soviet propaganda posters persist in contemporary Russian public imagination, they act as highly recognizable ‘templates’ for memes that survive over decades upon being re-purposed to different forms of popular expression in digital space.

Although some recent studies focus on memes devoted to the Russian politics (Lukianova et al., 2019; Wiggins, 2016), there are no similar initiatives that would examine memes related specifically to the Soviet period (with an exception of study by Makhortykh, who conducted analysis of memes related to the Second World War). Nevertheless, Russian users continue to transform the Soviet cultural and symbolic legacy on the Web, so there are numerous remakes of portraits of Soviet leaders, memes created from Soviet films and cartoons, demotivators comparing life in the former USSR with the current Russian reality and other digital practices. This article is only a first step towards studying of what can be called a ‘memeification’ (Dean, 2019) of the Soviet past: a fresh dimension that brings together the subjects of digital aesthetics, creative media practices, contemporary Russian visual culture and post-Soviet studies.

On a practical level, Soviet-related memes may provide a grass-roots re-conceptualisation of the Soviet past. In this regard, such memes can be used as inevitable instruments for the analysis of post-Soviet digital memory, which operates with vernacular recollections generated by common users in response to official interpretations of history (Rutten & Zvereva, 2013). On the methodology level, the current study offers a new analytical framework for the investigation of memes that are based on a prominent artwork or historical image. Potentially, this can be employed to similar cases extracted from different historical and national contexts, for example, memes of the US and British war posters or any other history-inspired graphic Fandom.

Further research on ‘memeification’ of the Soviet past can be extended to include all sorts of memes representing the Soviet epoch and not only the ones based on propaganda posters. Through quantitative research methods, the selected empirical material can be classified according to different criteria and forms of appropriation of the transformed Soviet imagery on the Web. A subsequent qualitative analysis might take a few potential trajectories towards studying of how the post-Soviet memes contribute to public expression, identity building and collective memorialisation in Russian digital sphere. Moreover, it is also possible to extend such research to digital spaces of other post-Soviet regions, while investigating memes produced by citizens of other former Soviet republics.