Of the noted Soviet poster artists of the photomontage and Socialist Realism aesthetics, Viktor Borisovich Koretskii stands out as one of the most iconic. Koretskii attended the Secondary Professional Art School in Moscow from 1921 to 1929. He began working as a professional graphic designer in 1931 and he immediately gained recognition in the Soviet Union. His professional break-through occurred while working for the major state publishing houses Iskusstvo and Ogiz-Izogiz. During this that period of his work, he concentrated on (and perfected) his technique of photomontage. However, the period of the early 1930s in the Soviet Union meant that Koretskii had to move away from his own avant-garde style of discontinuous photomontage in order to be more consistent with the Socialist Realist dogma dictated by the government. During the 1930s, Koretskii also worked as an artistic director and decorator for Nikolai Okhlopkov 's Realistic Theatre and for Yurii Zavadsky's theatre-studio. From 1939 to 1987, he was a member of the editorial board of the film advertising publishing house Reklamfilm.

The 24th Lithography Workshop of Glavpoligrafizdat (Main Administration for Matters of Polygraphic Industry Publishing and Book Selling) was located at at Kronverkskaia and Mir Streets in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Historically, the workshop had its roots in Imperial Russia as a large printing operation founded in 1881 by Theodore Kibbel (Fedor Fyodorovich Kibbel'). Shortly after the printer was nationalized by the Soviets, it became the 1st State Lithography Workshop and in 1924, it was named in honor of Mikhail Pavlovich Tomskii (1880-1936), the head of the Soviet trade union and head of the State Publishing House. In the early 1930s, the printer was reorganized as the 24th Lithography Workshop of Ogiz (Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers). Glavpoligrafizdat was instituted as the workshop’s operations manager in 1949 (when Ogiz was dissolved) and, it was subordinate to the Council of Ministries of the USSR, the main executive agency of the nation from 1946 until 1991.

Iskusstvo was the Art Publishing House (A.K.A. Visual Arts Publishing) that was created in 1936 from Ogiz-Izogiz (State Art and Literature Publishing House). It disseminated books and journals dealing with graphic design and the fine arts, and it issued numerous posters. Since the Iskusstvo banner was part of the State Printing Works in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow, its two main offices were located in those two cities.