Worlds of Modernity: Russia and the Soviet Union Between 1917 and 1923 the lands of the former Russian Empire were transformed through revolution and civil war into the world’s first communist state, the Soviet Union. Few of us, picturing the drab fashions and empty store shelves of later Soviet times, would think of the USSR as a particularly consumerist society. Yet, in an effort to speed the country’s economic recovery after years of war, in 1921 the communist leadership instituted a New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed for limited free enterprise and a relatively open society for the rest of the decade. Beyond its appeal to entrepreneurs, NEP exerted a strong attraction on some of Russia’s leading writers and artists, who produced clever, eye-catching advertising copy and graphics to engage the new Soviet consumer in the give and take of the market. Renowned modernist, futurist, and constructivist artists and writers such as Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Mayakovsky accepted innumerable commissions under NEP, producing posters, jingles, slogans, and logos that combined an idealized image of the Soviet Union’s avant-garde modernity with the more traditional forms most familiar to average citizens: the USSR as modernizing dynamo, where camels and turbaned Uzbeks coexist in perfect harmony with women laborers, and archaic Russian script is used to identify soaring futuristic structures. Later, after NEP was abolished and the USSR reverted to a monolithic command economy in which the consumer’s choices for a given product dwindled to one, or even none, the need to market goods rapidly disappeared. The concept of advertising, to the extent it still existed, applied mainly to the process of marketing the Soviet state and the communist party to the masses, and Russia began a new, less colorful, and far grimmer phase in its forced march to industrialization. Today, in post-Soviet space, the juxtaposition of traditional and modern elements may not be as widespread as it was in the 1920s, but where it occurs it is still just as striking.