Theses for the summary report on the survey of advertising organizations

Section: Materials, Documents, Publications

The publication is a document from the archival collection of the State Archive of the Russian Federation with comments from the researcher who discovered it and introduced it into scientific circulation. The document contains a description of the Soviet advertising market in the period of the 1920s. The text was created during the implementation of the New Economic Policy in the USSR. It was intended for official use and has never been published in open sources. The text is a detailed analytical note on the state of the advertising business in the USSR by the mid-1920s, prepared by the staff of the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of the USSR. This state body was engaged in auditing the activities of various institutions, enterprises, and economic sectors of the Soviet state. One of his key tasks was to identify the shortcomings of the Soviet system in order to eliminate them later. Due to this specificity, the published report is critical in nature, its authors focused on the shortcomings of the established advertising market in the USSR. The document contains general data on the structure of the Soviet advertising market, its financial turnover, the nature of the staff and other parameters. The text also provides qualitative characteristics of the industry, describes the specifics of its functioning, and highlights numerous abuses typical of advertising enterprises. The published material makes it possible to clarify many parameters not only of the Soviet advertising market, but also of the Soviet media economy as a whole.

Babyuk M. I. (2025) K voprosu ob etapakh ekonomicheskogo razvitiya sovetskoy pechati v 1920-e gg. [Periodization of the economic development of the Soviet press in the 1920s]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriya 10. Zhurnalistika 1: 94–129. DOI: 10.55959/msu.vestnik.journ.1.2025.94129. (In Russian)