“Tobacco is a poison. Quit smoking!”

I recently ran across this wonderful old Soviet poster on the blog ‘A Soviet Poster A Day’.

The poster says “Tobacco is a Poison. Quit Smoking!” The tiny information, according to the blogger, states: “Nicotine extracted from 4 cigarettes kills a rabbit, and it takes only a 100 cigarettes’ worth of nicotine to kill a horse.”

Wow, that’s almost as scary as second-hand smoke. At least, according to the CDC. (I cover the topic at length in my new book.)

As you can see, there are pictures of dead animals on the poster, so clearly it’s all true. The poster is from 1957. And one wonders, if, in the backwaters of the Soviet Union everyone knew that smoking could kill a horse, why Americans had no idea that sucking down tobacco fumes was an insalubrious habit.

Supposedly, the first time we realized that smoking was unhealthy was with the Surgeon General’s 1964 report on the matter.

The pack of cigarettes in the right upper corner is one of the major tobacco brands popular in the Soviet Union: “Kazbek”, named after the Kazbek Mountain on the Caucasus. The pack layout features distinctive horseman and the mountain’s background. This is another truly brilliant graphical work, which could easily compete with the famous “Gitanes” design… if only the tobacco was good. But it was not, as at that time rural population was smoking home-grown tobacco of an awful quality and even in the cities filters were not common until 80s. 

What’s ironic is that the Communist state controlled the production of tobacco. Almost as ironic as this country’s habit of supporting health-care initiatives for children through prohibitive taxes on smokers.