Advertisements in Russian provincial press at the beginning of the First World War

Purpose This paper aims to examine some common and specific features of advertisements published in Tsaritsyn’s (present-day Volgograd) daily newspapers at the beginning of the First Word War. The town of Tsaritsyn was a local centre of the rapid economic growth that the Russian Empire experienced in the early 1910s; it can be considered a model of Russian provincial advertising behaviours and the consumer culture of the time. Design/methodology/approach The main methods used in this paper are the local history approach and discourse and socio-political, content and gender analysis, as well as compositional interpretation. These methods have made the reconstruction of a historical portrait of Tsaritsyn possible at the beginning of the First Word War through an analysis of advertisements published in its periodicals. The sources of this paper include selections from the newspaper Tsaritsynsky Vestnik from June 1914 to February 1915, the newspaper Volgo-Donskoy Krai from September 1911 to February 1915 and the calendar-handbook Ves Tsaritsyn of 1911. Findings Advertising is a highly adaptive phenomenon of socio-economic activity. However, it is both conservative in form and content. It is simultaneously constant and changing, and so it can reveal some transformations in the provincial town’s daily life. Research limitations/implications Local history methods, including the ideographic, are designed to better explore unique historical events. Research based on these methods becomes more valuable in larger quantity, allowing the implementation of nomothetic methods that elucidate historical regularities and general trends. Practical implications This paper’s findings can be used in further research on global and local aspects of marketing history and development of consumer society, as well as in university courses concerning the disciplines mentioned above. Originality/value This paper studies newspaper advertisements published at the beginning of the First Word War in a Russian provincial town. It reveals some transformations in their content and form which occurred after the outbreak of the war. While the subjects of the advertisements remained relatively unchanged, a number of promotions decreased, social and entertainments advertising became starker and more harshly patriotic and long-used promotional methods became sarcastic during time of war.