Just Say Nyet: The Soviet Battle Against Booze

In the waning days of Soviet Russia, its leader Mikhail Gorbachev made a last, desperate attempt to curb his nation’s rampant alcoholism through severe restrictions and a broad-reaching, exceptionally blunt advertising campaign. In appeals to health, common decency, emotional well-being, and labor production alike, the government begged its people to give up the bottle. It did not succeed. 

B.A. Van Sise FRGS is a photographic artist, author, and curator, primarily focused on the intersection between language and the visual form. Previously a journalist for the Village Voice and Newsday, he is also the author of Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life: After the Holocaust, and On the National Language: the Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues with DeLanna Studi and Crisosto Apache. His work has been featured in major solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Woody Guthrie Center, and the Skirball Cultural Center, and in group exhibitions at the Centro Millepiani in Rome and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, and in Moscow at both the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center and United States Embassy.