1B

The National Agricultural Museum's poster collection is one of the most extensive in the Czech Republic. It contains over one thousand examples that document the transformation of agriculture from the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 to the present day. One of the most striking and coherent sections of the collection is a series of over 200 posters from the collectivisation period (1948–1960).

During the 1950s, agricultural posters became one of the primary tools of Communist propaganda. Posters flooded public spaces, seeking to convince the population of the supposed advantages of collective farming. They offered accessible narratives, clear symbols and optimistic images of a 'new' countryside, presenting collective labour as the sole route to progress. Therefore, they are not merely aesthetic artefacts, but above all a key to understanding how the state forcibly shaped ideas about the landscape and the role of the individual in socialist society.

This exhibition invites you to explore the motifs through which state propaganda constructed the image of agriculture during collectivisation. You will learn how the symbol of the exemplary socialist cooperative farmer was created, how enemies of the regime were demonised, and how technology and modernisation were used to promote the achievements of the Unified Agricultural Cooperatives (JZD). Here, the posters are not passive works of art, but active shapers of the nature of collectivisation and influencers of everyday life in the countryside. Step into a world where the future of rural life was determined not by farmers and nature, but by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia's directives.