Valentin Viktorov was a Soviet poster artist, illustrator, and graphic designer known primarily for political posters, as well as works devoted to aviation, space exploration, agriculture, the Soviet armed forces, and state celebrations.

Born in Samara in 1909, Viktorov studied at the Moscow State Technical School of Fine Arts in Memory of the 1905 Revolution from 1927 to 1931. From the late 1920s, he was a member of the Youth Organization of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. His career as a poster artist began in the 1930s, with one of his early posters, Stop. Be Careful in the Street!, addressing road safety in 1935. During the Second World War, he served in the Soviet armed forces.

After the war, Viktorov established long-term collaborations with Soviet publishing houses, including Iskusstvo, Izogiz, Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Planeta, and Soviet Russia. He also illustrated and designed magazines including Znanie-Sila, Ogonyok, Soviet Warrior, Wings of the Motherland, and Science and Life. His posters covered political campaigns, agriculture, the Soviet Army and Navy, state holidays, elections, and Communist Party congresses.

From 1954, Viktorov worked with the All-Union Chamber of Commerce as a leading designer of Soviet exhibitions abroad. He produced exhibition designs for presentations in Vienna, Damascus, Zagreb, Izmir, Ljubljana, Milan, Oklahoma, and Shanghai. From the 1950s, he also worked with Izogiz, and from 1974 with the Plakat publishing house.

A major part of Viktorov's work focused on aviation and space exploration. From the late 1950s onward, he produced numerous posters celebrating Soviet achievements in aviation, science, and spaceflight, including works devoted to Yuri Gagarin, the Vostok missions, the Salyut programme, and the development of Soviet space technology. He also collaborated with other artists, including Aleksandr Andreadi, Aleksandr Pashenkov, and Veniamin Briskin.

Viktorov was one of the most prolific Soviet poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s. His later posters of the 1970s and 1980s increasingly used simplified compositions, laconic forms, and schematic imagery. His work is held in the collections of numerous Russian museums and libraries, including the Russian State Library, the State Historical Museum, the Museum of Cosmonautics, the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, and the Central Museum of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

Valentin Petrovich Viktorov