After the October Revolution of 1917, the porcelain factory came under the control of the People’s Commissariat for Education. This early Soviet equivalent of a ministry set the staff the goal of not only preserving the best traditions of Russian artistic porcelain, but also turning the former court factory into "a ceramics testing laboratory of republican significance" producing "agitation porcelain in the lofty sense of the word - revolutionary in content, perfect in form, immaculate in technical execution". The factory was headed by Piotr Friken.
The early years of Soviet power in Russia were marked by an outpouring of mass art for propaganda purposes. The products of the renamed State Porcelain factory began to carry the same slogans, quotes and aphorisms as could be found on posters and panels in the streets and squares.
Almost all of the agitation porcelain, with the exception of the sculpture, was the result of new painted decoration. The actual dishes, trays, cups, plates and so on were taken from the stock of "blanks"(white articles that had not yet been painted) in the imperial stores. The old trademark was carefully blotted out and a new, Soviet one placed alongside.
The creation of post-revolutionary porcelain is associated with the names of Sergei Chekhonin, appointed by the art section of the People’s Commissariat for Education to take charge of the artistic side of the business, Vasily Kuznetsov, Natalia Danko, Rudolph Wilde, Mikhail Adamovich, Zinaida Kobyletskaya, Maria Lebedeva, Nathan Altman, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vasily Tatlin, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Pavel Kuznetsov, Boris Kustodiev, Alexander Matveyev, Nikolai Andreyev and Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya. The founding-father of Suprematism, Kazimir Malevich, turned to porcelain in his search for new forms, striving to produce physical embodiments of the "principle of the utilitarian perfection of the thing".
In 1918 Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya joined the factory at Chekhonin’s invitation. She was a pupil of Nikolai Roerich and Ivan Bilibin and had already shown her worth as a theatrical designer. It was, however, in porcelain that this artist’s amazing talent fully revealed itself. "Looking at her works," the art-historian Erich Hollerbach wrote, "you see before you a mischievous talented sign-painter, daubing on a sign some slapdash frills, for no apparent reason other than for the sake of the all-sufficient beauty of the paints. Shchekotikhina’s painting evokes mixed aural associations. It creates the illusion of a country song, comic ditties, the ringing of church bells at Easter, jolly sounds of an accordion, hallooing and a slanging match."
A special place in the small-scale plastic art of the early 1920s is taken by five figures of nude women produced by the sculptor Alexander Matveyev. Each of them is marked by a distinctive, unique smooth flowingness of line. They seem to radiate a dim light, conveying the "play of shimmering highlights and light, translucent shadows".
Revolutionary themes found reflection in the porcelain figurines of another sculptor, Natalia Danko. Life inspired her to create the image of a Red Army Man - a young Russian lad "in clumsy felt boots, a thick red half-length sheepskin coat and a crumpled Cossack hat who carries his rifle any odd way and has the inevitable sack slung on his back"; or the figure of a Militiawoman who overnight has found herself "the guardian of order on the streets of a Petrograd almost stripped of its able-bodied male population".
In the 1920s avant-garde porcelain became an important export item for the art industry of the Soviet republic. In 1925 the factory presented some 300 items that had been made in the post-revolutionary period at the World Exhibition in Paris and was awarded a large gold medal. At the request of Western European collectors, the factory twice repeated the display of the Paris exhibition for sale. This success was reinforced at the Industrial Exhibition in Milan and the Paris International Fair.
In 1925, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences, the name of the great 18th-century scientist and scholar Mikhail Lomonosov was added to the title of the porcelain factory.
