Дым, в котором мы живём (The Smoke in Which We Live)

Дым, в котором мы живём (The Smoke in Which We Live)

An apartment tower rendered as an open cigarette pack, with cigarettes rising from it, stands among city blocks and factory chimneys venting white smoke. The title equates the smoke of tobacco with the smoke the city already breathes. Fear-appeal and transfer tell: industrial-pollution imagery is used to stigmatise smoking, with no data cited.

Date
1988
Period
Cold War
Made by
Izdatel'stvo 'Reklama', Kiev, Ukrainian SSR (state publishing house; design by I. V. Tomash)
Region
Eastern Europe and Eurasia
Country
Soviet Union
Medium
Poster
Issuer type
State
Regime
Soviet Union
Leader
Mikhail Gorbachev
Audience
Domestic public
Purpose
Warn or inform
Theme
Health
Techniques
Fear appealTransfer
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Wellcome Collection (London), work b1660216x, reference 660216i, retrieved September 29, 2026
Rights
CC BY 4.0 as stated by Wellcome Collection (1988 Soviet work; underlying rights unverified)
Wellcome Collection

Text on the object

Original (Russian) · read from the image, not independently checked

дым,
в котором
мы живём

[Small print, lower left:] Художник И. В. Томаш. Редактор Н. Н. Бойко. Художественный редактор А. П. Верёша. Технический редактор Л. И. Аленина. © Издательство «Реклама», 1988
[Lower centre:] Киев «Реклама» 1988
[Small print, lower right:] Подписано в печать 15.07.88 [...] Тираж 30 000 экз. [...] Цена 15 к. Киевская нотная фабрика, 252653, Киев, ГСП, Фрунзе, 51а. [rest illegible]

English translation (machine translation by Claude, not verified by a fluent reader)

The smoke in which we live. [Small print:] Artist I. V. Tomash. Editor N. N. Boiko. Art editor A. P. Veresha. Technical editor L. I. Alenina. (c) Publishing house 'Reklama', 1988. Kiev, 'Reklama', 1988. Signed for printing 15.07.88 [...] Print run 30,000 copies [...] Price 15 kop. Kiev Music-Printing Works, 252653, Kiev, GSP, Frunze 51a.

Title read from the committed image; the small print was read from a higher-resolution crop of the bottom margin and is partly illegible (catalogue numbers and paper/format lines omitted as [...]).