London exhibition presents Soviet anti-alcohol campaign posters

Given up booze for Lent? Maybe visiting the upcoming Alcohol: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Posters exhibition at London’s Pushkin House will give you the encouragement you need to see it through until the end.

Designed and curated by FUEL Design and Publishing, Pushkin House will host a selection of previously unseen Soviet anti-alcohol posters from the FUEL archive. The featured posters will also be published as a book, titled Alcohol, set to be launched at the same time as the exhibition.

The exhibition and book will showcase a wide range of posters from the 1960s — 1980s, but will focus particularly on those produced during Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, which included partial prohibition, colloquially known as the “dry law” — all in the name of beating “the green snake” of alcohol.

A number of events will run alongside the exhibition, including a vodka tasting with food from Zima restaurant led by Pushkin Wine Club’s Tanya Nesterova on 30 March and a talk on the role of alcohol in Venedikt Yerofeyev’s classic prose poem Moscow-Petushki (1970) on 31 March.

Alcohol: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Posters will run at Pushkin House from 23 March — 13 April 2017. Find out more here.