Red Tape-Makers Crush the Sprouts of any Initiative like Road Rollers! is a satirical poster from the early Perestroika years, aimed squarely at bureaucratic obstruction. The title comes from a Russian idiom comparing administrative resistance to a steamroller flattening anything that tries to grow.
The image makes that literal. A bureaucrat's face — oversized glasses, a fixed grin, angular features — merges directly into the body of an industrial roller. Underneath it, documents labelled "Project," "Proposal," and "Invention" are being crushed flat. The horizontal lines behind him reinforce the sense of mechanical, unstoppable weight.
The colour palette is just blue, black, and orange. The bureaucrat's face is the only orange element, which is what holds the eye — everything else recedes into the dark mass of the roller and background. The flat shapes and bold lines borrow directly from earlier Soviet propaganda style, but the exaggeration of the figure pushes it into caricature rather than heroism.
This surviving oil sketch, along with its silkscreen counterpart from Agitplakat Don, is unusual simply for existing — preliminary poster work was normally destroyed once a piece went to print.