Iraklii Moiseevich Toidze was a Soviet graphic artist and painter. He began his artistic studies at the Tbilisi Academy of Arts where he graduated in 1930. His earliest works, like the 1927 “Ilyich's Light Bulb” (held in the Museum of Art of Oriental Peoples, Moscow), helped underscore the role of Soviet themes within the field of Georgian art. Furthermore, Toidze executed the noted Georgian-themed painting, “Young Dzhugashvili [Stalin] reads Rustaveli's 'The Knight in the Panther's skin’”...

The 1st Exemplary Typography Workshop was named in honor of Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov (1896-1948), a Soviet military leader and a senior member of the Politburo who died in 1948. Reportedly, Andrei Zhdanov controlled the atomic espionage division of the USSR and he was Josef Stalin's closest confidant. Historically, the 1st Exemplary Typography Workshop began as the Sharapov-Sytin Partnerhip, a printing workshop formed before the Russian Revolution. Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin (1851-1934) was the son of a peasant. ...

Ogiz was the Association of the State Book and Magazine Publishers. Its main offices were located in Moscow and in Leningrad. The Sovnarkom of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic established Ogiz in 1930 to centralize publishing activities under a state monopoly. In 1931, certain publications were separated from Ogiz. This principally affected technical manuals and propaganda material issued by the publisher. For example, posters, art magazines and artistic books were placed under Izogiz (Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo), the ...