1987, To forget history is to risk repeating it
The picture shows president Leonid Brezhnev's dress uniform. The years of his rule (1964-1982) were a period of stagnation and wars and personality cult. Nevertheless, he saw himself as a figure of the stature of Lenin, and awarded himself more military medals than Stalin and Khrushchev combined. As a visual pun, Faldin added one more gold star for "Hero of the Soviet Union" to the empty uniform.
1988, Bravo!
President Mikhail Gorbachev is shown as a brilliant conductor, being applauded for his politics with shouts of "Bravo!" from the audience. However, a closer look at the title of his musical scores shows that they are from V.I. Lenin, so he is in fact playing basically the same old tune as all his predecessors. The poster is an early diagnosis on the merits and the future of the soviet leader that introduced "Perestroika" (reform) and "Glasnost" (openness), and a prognosis that proved to be correct only three years later when Gorbachev saw the empire crumble in his hands.
1990, Soviet Christmas tree
Public display of religious symbols, even Christmas trees, was not tolerated in the Soviet Union, and religious holidays like Good Friday were transformed into normal working days. Instead, the red star on top of one of the Kremlin towers served as an almost holy icon of communism, and there was liberation day, women's day, workers day and so on. There is no text, and I interpreted the poster as saying "Look what a shabby deal the people got in this exchange of symbols", but Alexander wrote me: The main idea of this poster is the end of the USSR. At soviet times soviet families usually decorated the New Year tree with a star on the top. But in their warm homes, the tree looses needles, dies. A skeleton with the Kremlin star. So it is a symbol of the coming death of the soviet country. Time is running out for the soviet system. One year later it happened.
1988, Happy birthday, Komsomol!
Komsomol was the name of the soviet youth organization, founded in 1918 shortly after the revolution, probably with good intentions. Girls wore a red scarf to be recognized as members. The party soon realized that Komsomol gave them an early grip on youngsters, but at it's 70th anniversary in 1988, it had deteriorated into a club of middle aged potbellied functionaries that had all but forgotten the interests of young people. Faldin used a portrait of his grandmother to satyrize the sad state of affairs, well known to everybody. The official publication "Plakat perestroiki" published in 1988 by "Izdadelstvo Plakat" in Moscow preferred not to understand the joke and subtitled the poster with "The old lady is wearing her red scarf again to congratulate Komsomol on it's 70th birthday".