Ekaterina Sergeevna Zernova studied in Moscow at the private art school of the master painter Fedor Rerberg from 1915 to 1918. She continued her studies at GSKhM (State Free Artistic Studios) / Vkhutemas (Russian State Art and Technical School) where she graduated in 1924. She was a prominent artist with OST (Society of Easel Painters) and after that society terminated, she became a member of IzoBrigada (Art Brigade), formed in 1931 to advance 'political realism' in art. IzoBrigada was subsequently dissolved in 1932.

The 24th Lithography Workshop was located at Kronverkskaia and Mir Streets in St. Petersburg (Petrograd). Historically, the workshop had its roots in Imperial Russia and it was 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. In 1924, the workshop was named in honor of Mikhail Pavlovich Tomskii (1880-1936), head of the Soviet trade union and the head of the State Publishing House. During the early 1930s, the printer was reorganized as the 24th Lithography Workshop of Ogiz (Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers) and was placed under the management of the Poligrafkniga (Book and Magazine Printing) state printing trust.

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 order to eliminate duplication of printed material, streamline and control publishing production and 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. 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 fine arts section of Ogiz. In 1949, Ogiz was reorganized and merged into Glavpoligrafizdat, the Main Administration for Matters of the Polygraphic Industry, Publishing and Book Selling. In 1953, Glavpoligrafizdat was reorganized and renamed, Glavizdat. Thereafter, the publishing, printing and bookselling monopoly in the USSR was separated into three distinct divisions. In 1963, Izogiz was merged with the publishing house, "Soviet Artist" (Sovetskii khudozhnik).