“The working class must create for itself its own technical-production intelligentsia!” – Stalin
Formed in the late 1920s in Leningrad, the Izoram collective attracted amateur artists who worked closely with professionals in a mentoring atmosphere. Izoram’s declaration (approved in March 1930 by the art council of the Komsomol regional committee) read: “Izoram is a goal-oriented collective of working youth with a task, under the leadership of the Communist Party and the Komsomol, to actively participate in the class struggle of the proletariat and contribute to the socialist restructuring of life...". With the formation of the Artists Union of the USSR in 1932, Izoram was dissolved along with other independent art groups.
The Izvestia (News) All-Union Central Executive Committee Typography Offset Print Shop was located in Moscow and it printed the Izvestia newspaper. Both Izvestia and Pravda (Truth) were the leading newspapers in the Soviet Union. One Soviet-era joke said, "there is no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia".
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).