Vladimir Dionisievich Kalenskii was born into a large family. He became known as a muralist and a poster artist in the Soviet Union as well as in international art circles. In 1925, when his father was invited to work at the VSNKh (Supreme Economic Council of the USSR), the family moved to Moscow. In 1940, Vladimir Kalenskii was called into active naval service and during World War II, he served with the Northern Fleet.  From 1945 to 1950, he attended the Moscow Higher School of Industrial Art (formerly the Stroganov School) where he studied under the tutelage of Sergei Gerasimov, a noted Soviet artist . Kalenskii's diploma work was a tempera-based painting entitled The Struggle for Peace. From 1952 to 1957, he worked as a lecturer at Moscow Higher School of Industrial Art while serving as a teaching assistant to Gerasimov.

The 1st Offset Printing Plant of the Lensovnarkhoz (Leningrad Economic Regional Council) was located near Kronverkskaia and Mir Streets in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). In the late 1950s until the early 1960s, the printer’s operations were managed by the UPP (Printing Industry Management) of Lensovnarkhoz. Historically, the printer had roots in Imperial Russia as a large operation founded in 1881 by Theodore Kibbel (Fedor Fyodorovich Kibbel') until it was nationalized by the Soviets in 1917. After its initial nationalization, the printer's management (via a series of government-controlled printing trusts) and its name both changed over the decades.

The history of IzoGiz begins with the formation of Ogiz, the Association of the State Book and Magazine Publishers. In 1930, the Sovnarkom of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic established Ogiz to centralize publishing under a monopoly in order to eliminate duplication of printed material, to streamline and control publishing production and its output, and to create a base for marketing books, training and technical manuals. In 1931, the Central Committee of the USSR ordered certain publications be separated from Ogiz. The separation 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 fine arts section of Ogiz. In 1963, Izogiz was merged with the publishing house, "Soviet Artist" (Sovetskii khudozhnik).