“Give beer to the people” (about alcoholic beverages market in the Soviet advertisement: linguocultural aspect)

Abstract

The object of this article is the Soviet advertisement of the certain period — the period of the advertisement poster, which allows comparing it with the pre-revolutionary advertisement with regard to the purpose and factual influence as the main function of advertisement. Advertisement poster is creolized (multimodal) text, which is composed of visual and textual elements. Therefore, the article analyses the extralinguistic factors, which caused an uprise of advertisement in the society with no competition in combination with a description of the representative and verbal components. The exceptional interest in this article lies in the advertisement of the beer market. The reason of such attention to the advertisement of beer is stipulated by a complete government monopoly on producing goods in the USSR, but the beer market was distinguished by a variety of manufacturers of beer in one or another way demonstrating the special qualities of their product, that remotely resembled a competitive market. The article describes both differences of Soviet and pre-revolutionary advertisement of beer and a kind of continuity of images, names and linguistis forms, that may be an indicator of the national identity of the advertising industry. Soviet advertisement of beer and other food products was both educational and ideological. Unlike pre-revolutionary advertisement, it appealed to the conscious structures of the mentality (it was rational), while pre-revolutionary advertisement created an attractive image of the product (it was atmospheric).