Vintage Russian Circus Posters

On March 30, 2014 by Tim Newman

A little while back I published a collection of old freak show posters from the Victorian days. This time I’ve got a slightly more modern set of pictures from Russian circuses. They’re more PC and less grotesque, but they’re just as weird.

In a time when moving freely around Russia was more than a little tricky, the circus performers were one of the few groups of people with any semblance of freedom. They were also a reminder to those that they visited that there was other stuff going on around their country. Olga Sviblova, the head of the art and multimedia museum in Moscow, said that “Circus and sports were the only two spots in Soviet 1930s that had freedom”.

Here are a few of the posters they used to advertise their own brand of cultural and spatial freedom: