Despite being produced in the 1920's, the speculative depiction of what a future war could look like is reminiscient of science-fiction that wouldn't be produced until decades later. I have carefully redrawn, recolored, and restored this design by hand in order to preserve this interesting piece of early Soviet and Azerbaijani artistic and geopolitical history.
The large title reads: "Gələcək müharibələrin dəhşəti" or "The Horror (terror / nightmare) of Future Wars"
In the white box at the top-right, there’s a slogan that roughly correlates to "Workers of the world, unite!"
The headline is in Azerbaijani, written in Arabic script (Perso-Arabic orthography), a writing system that remained standard in Soviet Azerbaijan until the late 1920s. The Latin alphabet was officially introduced in Azerbaijan in 1929, replacing Arabic script in state usage, even though Latin experiments and documents appear earlier in the decade. It is a concrete artifact of early Soviet nationality policy and mass political education, when propaganda was frequently produced in local languages to reach the USSR’s many linguistic communities. This multilingual strategy aligns with broader early Soviet “nation-building” approaches, which promoted local languages and institutions while integrating them into a Soviet framework. In practice, it meant that a viewer in Baku or elsewhere in Soviet Azerbaijan could encounter internationalist slogans, class messaging, and warnings about modern warfare in a familiar linguistic form.
The poster’s fixation on aircraft and urban destruction speaks to a major interwar anxiety: the belief that the next great conflict would be decided through air power and the bombardment of cities. Across the 1920s, military planners, governments, and publics debated how populations would respond to aerial threat and urban catastrophe, and “future war” became a widely discussed horizon of fear. This poster translates that abstract dread into an immediate nightmare, making the viewer inhabit the coming apocalypse rather than merely imagine it. In the Soviet context, that warning also served politics. The message “Workers/Proletarians of the world, unite!” (present on the poster in Azerbaijani) connects anti-war horror to a classic revolutionary conclusion: international class solidarity is framed as the moral counter-force to imperialist or capitalist war. That pairing is typical of Soviet visual culture, where “peace” messaging often functioned as a call to political alignment rather than pacifism in the abstract.
The work is attributed to an unknown artist, printed as a lithograph on paper, and survives in a format typical of mass political graphics. Small imprint lines on the original art suggest that only 1000 copies of this poster were originally produced.
Magnet material is a heavy-duty vinyl (0.5 mm) with a strong attachment, and is suitable for both indoor and outdoor usage.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to hit me up and let me know! I also do custom work, so if you want something specifically made, I can do just about anything!
• Made from 0.5 mm flexible vinyl
• Premium matte finish
• Magnetic black backing