Viktor Deni's poster promoting the Red Army during the Civil War after the 1917 Russian Revoltuon (1918).
Communists initially were reluctant to use folklore or literary fairy tales for their propaganda or educational purposes.
They considered folklore an old art, which will be replaced by the new art. For example, Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaia was a major voice rejecting fantasy works as non-realist and ideologically useless for young readers. Krupskaia argued that: “We cannot just give any entertaining little book. I think that old literature must be reexamined and we must take what we can from it but other parts can be discarded. And old books must be remade, must be
‘Sovietized’.” She believed that “to teach children such nonsense, to read him or her such trash …ha[s] nothing in common with the upbringing that Soviet parents want to provide children…The only worthwhile Soviet children’s books [are] those explicitly extol[ing] the virtues of collectivism, discipline, work and other socialist principles.” (Cited in Jacqueline Olich. “Competing Ideologies and Children’s Books: The Making of a Soviet Children’s Literature, 1918-1935.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999, pp. 248 and 252)
But in the 1930s Stalin and his cultural producers started using folk-style stories, such as epics, folktales, lubok, puppet theater, to promote communist ideas. See Marfa Kriukova's novinas ("Tale of the Pole" 1937),
"The Chuvash Peasant and the Eagle" (1937),
propaganda immitations of folktales, "The War of Kings", a comic strip style story explaining to illiterate peasants the origins and meaning of the WWI.
Stalin's novinas, immitations of folk tales are forms of communist fakelore.