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Europe/Russia : A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

 

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Guthrum
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28 Apr 2018
02:14:44pm
Stalin’s Fourth Five-Year Plan – there’s a subject to challenge the stamp designer’s art – or even the casual collector’s interest!

These Five-Year Plans were nationwide centralised economic plans designed to lift the Soviet Union from the backward, uneducated country it became under the Tsars to a modern industrial and agricultural powerhouse fuelled by the positive ideology of the communist party. (Propaganda alert! But you get the idea.) There were thirteen of these Plans, beginning in 1928, but unrepresented on stamps until 1946.

Then, there were plenty – forty-four of them in the next two years, in six sets (or eight, depending on how you count). Surely, a deliberate propaganda drive, the Soviet Union getting back on its feet after a ruinous, if victorious, war.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, stamp designs illustrating economic plans struggle to inspire the artist, much less attract the casual viewer, or collector. In the years after World War Two, Soviet stamp design was going through one of its duller periods, both in subject matter, technical accomplishment and iconography. There are plenty of cropped photographs in muddy single-colour tones, hedged about with inevitable slogans. There is nothing abstract, or even non-representative – that was not the approved style. The initial Fourth Five-Year Plan set was given to V. (possibly Vladimir) Andreev. Let’s look at his stamps first.

Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found

Andreev’s designs make the best of the unpromising commission. When he uses deep-focus diagonals – best seen in the ‘Oil’, ‘Coal’ and ‘Steel’ stamps (10k., 15k., 20k.) – the image becomes dynamic, the human figures adding perspective. In his ‘Agriculture’ stamp (5k.) he frames the field and harvester with a wheatsheaf , the buildings in the distance giving the necessary depth. The ‘Iron’ image is perhaps less successful – while the human figure echoes the ‘Coal’ stamp, the image lacks the diagonal, allowing insufficient perspective to the composition: the towering gantries, suitably distant in ‘Coal’, seem to want to push the worker out of frame.

What are these images? I’m going to hazard a guess that the 5k. is essentially a photograph. I’m less sure about the others – the 15k. in particular looks like an artistic composition, and if we are identifying the designer as the artist Vladimir Andreev (on no available evidence other than a given year of birth, 1910) then it may well be based on a painting.

The second set followed a year later, and was the work of Vasily Zavyalov, Goznak's most prolific designer who had been absent (presumably on war work) for the previous six years. There were eleven stamps in this set, incorporating six separate designs:


Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found Image Not Found

What do you think? I've not yet translated the various rubrics Zavyalov likes to insert into his designs, but those banners of his do clutter (in my view).

I'll leave this post there, to see what response it gets. Then we may well move on to Zavyalov's major four-set, 28-stamp issues of 1948.

Unless you're all Five-Year-Planned-out by then!









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philb
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28 Apr 2018
04:22:34pm

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re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Guthrum, i am on a 5 year plan !Happy

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ikeyPikey
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28 Apr 2018
07:21:32pm
re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

I have always felt that a good place to begin is that politics & ideology & propaganda make for bad art.

Sure, every so often, you get songs like If I Had a Hammer or This Land is Your Land but, for the most part, music-with-an-argument is music you don't listen to for pleasure.

Stamps are not immune.

Guthrum is correct that a strong design element - such as the train adding depth to the 15k - can make for an art-first-message-second experience.

Whereas slapping banners onto the scene, well, not so much.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

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angore
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Al
Collector, Moderator

29 Apr 2018
06:11:24am
re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Since I do not read Russian, I just notice the art aspects.

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Guthrum
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29 Apr 2018
12:41:18pm
re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Angore, my apologies - I should have appended translations.

That said, the banners in the Zavyalov set resist interpretation by my usual method of transcribing words letter-by-letter into Google Translate. I can only assume that either (a) the slogans depicted were so well-known that it was deemed unnecessary to make them any clearer, or (b) the actual wording of the slogans was considered secondary to the fact that the whole business was so worth waving banners about!

However, there is basic informative text on all these stamps. In the Andreev set they follow a set pattern, as follows:

“We will give the country 127 million tons of grain/60m tons of oil/500m tons of coal/60m tons of steel/50m tons of cast iron annually”.

In the Zavyalov set, the depictions are, respectively:

The Konstantinov Metallurgy Factory
The Makeevsk Metallurgical Plant
Rostov-on-Don Agricultural Machinery
The Kharkov XT3 Tractor Factory
The Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and
Rebuilding Stalingrad - the New Drama Theatre in (can't read the last word which curls round the ribbon, but probably a district or street)

It is as though Zavyalov was given these specific places to illustrate, while Andreev may just have been given the target figures. If so, I fear Zavyalov drew the short straw.

This 'Fourth Five-Year Plan' was obviously taken very seriously. I wonder how many of those millions of tons were ever actually delivered; it is in the nature of state official targets that we will never know - the default estimate for western observers being "Not nearly that many"!

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malcolm197

09 May 2018
05:23:44am
re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Without getting into an argument based on political dogma, the 5 -year plans were bound to fail.

The problem is not the political theory but the over-centralised planning with the "managers" of the programme being out of touch with the grass roots ( an early example, perhaps of "Ivory Tower" syndrome prevalent in centrally managed private companies today).

Production targets ( or key performance indicators in modern business-speak ) to be succesful have to be achievable,or perhaps just beyond achievable, so that the men on the shop floor believe that if they work hard enough and smart enough they can get there. If they are patently over ambitious people don't try.

In the Soviet model the decision makers who are trying to make their way in the "power-struggle" almost inevitably "over-egg" the possibility to make themselves look good in the eyes of the next level. Regrettably the same flaws are multiplied down the ranks until when you get to the bottom the mountain is too high to climb. The same flaws occur in modern business, because

a) Everyone is trying to get to the top on the backs of everyone else so reality goes out of the window.

b) Everyone is busy telling the people above them what they think they want to hear. Telling your boss that what they want is impossible is seen as being negative. Nobody in business dare tell it how they see it !

Going back to the stamps, trumpeting the success of the plan seems to be tempting providence a little, although if you can hide your failures perhaps it does not matter.

Malcolm

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Guthrum
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09 May 2018
12:26:41pm
re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

This would suggest that the unprecedented number of stamps issued for the Fourth 5YP (as opposed to Plans 1-3 or 5-13) was mainly propagandist. Given the economic situation of post-war USSR, that is understandable, but in turn implies that Russian stamp collectors were a cohort sufficient in number to be worth targeting - which some may find unusual. Who were these stamp collectors?

Then again, Malcolm in another post reveals that the 5YP stamps are among those rarities to be found genuinely postally used (as opposed to CTO). If so, this implies some sort of programme where these stamps were supplied to post offices to the exclusion of others, and that another cohort, that of letter-writers, was its aim.

And once again we need evidence to show if this was so.

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Author/Postings
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Guthrum

28 Apr 2018
02:14:44pm

Stalin’s Fourth Five-Year Plan – there’s a subject to challenge the stamp designer’s art – or even the casual collector’s interest!

These Five-Year Plans were nationwide centralised economic plans designed to lift the Soviet Union from the backward, uneducated country it became under the Tsars to a modern industrial and agricultural powerhouse fuelled by the positive ideology of the communist party. (Propaganda alert! But you get the idea.) There were thirteen of these Plans, beginning in 1928, but unrepresented on stamps until 1946.

Then, there were plenty – forty-four of them in the next two years, in six sets (or eight, depending on how you count). Surely, a deliberate propaganda drive, the Soviet Union getting back on its feet after a ruinous, if victorious, war.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, stamp designs illustrating economic plans struggle to inspire the artist, much less attract the casual viewer, or collector. In the years after World War Two, Soviet stamp design was going through one of its duller periods, both in subject matter, technical accomplishment and iconography. There are plenty of cropped photographs in muddy single-colour tones, hedged about with inevitable slogans. There is nothing abstract, or even non-representative – that was not the approved style. The initial Fourth Five-Year Plan set was given to V. (possibly Vladimir) Andreev. Let’s look at his stamps first.

Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found

Andreev’s designs make the best of the unpromising commission. When he uses deep-focus diagonals – best seen in the ‘Oil’, ‘Coal’ and ‘Steel’ stamps (10k., 15k., 20k.) – the image becomes dynamic, the human figures adding perspective. In his ‘Agriculture’ stamp (5k.) he frames the field and harvester with a wheatsheaf , the buildings in the distance giving the necessary depth. The ‘Iron’ image is perhaps less successful – while the human figure echoes the ‘Coal’ stamp, the image lacks the diagonal, allowing insufficient perspective to the composition: the towering gantries, suitably distant in ‘Coal’, seem to want to push the worker out of frame.

What are these images? I’m going to hazard a guess that the 5k. is essentially a photograph. I’m less sure about the others – the 15k. in particular looks like an artistic composition, and if we are identifying the designer as the artist Vladimir Andreev (on no available evidence other than a given year of birth, 1910) then it may well be based on a painting.

The second set followed a year later, and was the work of Vasily Zavyalov, Goznak's most prolific designer who had been absent (presumably on war work) for the previous six years. There were eleven stamps in this set, incorporating six separate designs:


Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found Image Not Found
Image Not Found Image Not Found

What do you think? I've not yet translated the various rubrics Zavyalov likes to insert into his designs, but those banners of his do clutter (in my view).

I'll leave this post there, to see what response it gets. Then we may well move on to Zavyalov's major four-set, 28-stamp issues of 1948.

Unless you're all Five-Year-Planned-out by then!









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4 Members
like this post.
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Members Picture
philb

28 Apr 2018
04:22:34pm

Auctions

re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Guthrum, i am on a 5 year plan !Happy

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"And every hair is measured like every grain of sand"
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ikeyPikey

28 Apr 2018
07:21:32pm

re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

I have always felt that a good place to begin is that politics & ideology & propaganda make for bad art.

Sure, every so often, you get songs like If I Had a Hammer or This Land is Your Land but, for the most part, music-with-an-argument is music you don't listen to for pleasure.

Stamps are not immune.

Guthrum is correct that a strong design element - such as the train adding depth to the 15k - can make for an art-first-message-second experience.

Whereas slapping banners onto the scene, well, not so much.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
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angore

Al
Collector, Moderator
29 Apr 2018
06:11:24am

re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Since I do not read Russian, I just notice the art aspects.

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"Stamp Collecting is a many splendored thing"
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Guthrum

29 Apr 2018
12:41:18pm

re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Angore, my apologies - I should have appended translations.

That said, the banners in the Zavyalov set resist interpretation by my usual method of transcribing words letter-by-letter into Google Translate. I can only assume that either (a) the slogans depicted were so well-known that it was deemed unnecessary to make them any clearer, or (b) the actual wording of the slogans was considered secondary to the fact that the whole business was so worth waving banners about!

However, there is basic informative text on all these stamps. In the Andreev set they follow a set pattern, as follows:

“We will give the country 127 million tons of grain/60m tons of oil/500m tons of coal/60m tons of steel/50m tons of cast iron annually”.

In the Zavyalov set, the depictions are, respectively:

The Konstantinov Metallurgy Factory
The Makeevsk Metallurgical Plant
Rostov-on-Don Agricultural Machinery
The Kharkov XT3 Tractor Factory
The Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and
Rebuilding Stalingrad - the New Drama Theatre in (can't read the last word which curls round the ribbon, but probably a district or street)

It is as though Zavyalov was given these specific places to illustrate, while Andreev may just have been given the target figures. If so, I fear Zavyalov drew the short straw.

This 'Fourth Five-Year Plan' was obviously taken very seriously. I wonder how many of those millions of tons were ever actually delivered; it is in the nature of state official targets that we will never know - the default estimate for western observers being "Not nearly that many"!

Like 
2 Members
like this post.
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malcolm197

09 May 2018
05:23:44am

re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

Without getting into an argument based on political dogma, the 5 -year plans were bound to fail.

The problem is not the political theory but the over-centralised planning with the "managers" of the programme being out of touch with the grass roots ( an early example, perhaps of "Ivory Tower" syndrome prevalent in centrally managed private companies today).

Production targets ( or key performance indicators in modern business-speak ) to be succesful have to be achievable,or perhaps just beyond achievable, so that the men on the shop floor believe that if they work hard enough and smart enough they can get there. If they are patently over ambitious people don't try.

In the Soviet model the decision makers who are trying to make their way in the "power-struggle" almost inevitably "over-egg" the possibility to make themselves look good in the eyes of the next level. Regrettably the same flaws are multiplied down the ranks until when you get to the bottom the mountain is too high to climb. The same flaws occur in modern business, because

a) Everyone is trying to get to the top on the backs of everyone else so reality goes out of the window.

b) Everyone is busy telling the people above them what they think they want to hear. Telling your boss that what they want is impossible is seen as being negative. Nobody in business dare tell it how they see it !

Going back to the stamps, trumpeting the success of the plan seems to be tempting providence a little, although if you can hide your failures perhaps it does not matter.

Malcolm

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this post
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Guthrum

09 May 2018
12:26:41pm

re: A look at the Fourth Five-Year Plan

This would suggest that the unprecedented number of stamps issued for the Fourth 5YP (as opposed to Plans 1-3 or 5-13) was mainly propagandist. Given the economic situation of post-war USSR, that is understandable, but in turn implies that Russian stamp collectors were a cohort sufficient in number to be worth targeting - which some may find unusual. Who were these stamp collectors?

Then again, Malcolm in another post reveals that the 5YP stamps are among those rarities to be found genuinely postally used (as opposed to CTO). If so, this implies some sort of programme where these stamps were supplied to post offices to the exclusion of others, and that another cohort, that of letter-writers, was its aim.

And once again we need evidence to show if this was so.

Like
Login to Like
this post
        

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