After the October 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik Party seized on the political poster as a medium to convey information and ideology to the masses. The political poster assumed an especially important communicative role during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921). Due to the low level of literacy in the country, visual means of conveying political messages were privileged during the early years of Bolshevik rule. The first Soviet posters were designed to be visually striking and easily comprehensible for the illiterate but, over the course of the 1920s, the written word assumed an increasingly important role in poster art as efforts to improve the literacy rate succeeded.