Theme of the Calendar 2014 was ready to be embraced by the world. The whole country was preparing for the Olympic games in Sochi. I contacted the Sochi Organizing Committee and offered them collaboration, but they didn’t want to spoil the reputation with the naked beauties in retro style and preferred images of bunnies and bears. And since I was too excited about the idea to give it up, I decided to make an unofficial Sochi Olympics calendar. For these reasons, I never used the Olympics in Sochi Trademark.

No worries however because this turned out in favor of the calendar’s success. Thinking about the idea of the calendar, I imagined how it could look at the Winter Olympics, if the Soviet Union were made to be sexy. It was not easy to combine the style of the American pin-up to the ‘50s and Soviet social-realism. The inspiration came from Soviet posters, paintings and mosaics by Aleksandr Deineka, items used in the design of the station of the Moscow Metro “Mayakovskaya.” It served as a perfect complement versus stylized propaganda poetry of the Soviet Union. They were written by my friend and also artist, Elena Klimenko, especially for the calendar.