The article considers the problems of form and genre structure in the illustrated magazines published in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Germany and Soviet Ukraine. The attention is focused on morphology as a factor and indicator of the ideological situation of the time. The emphasis rests upon both similarities (genre structure, the heteronomy of text and picture) and differences (more vs. less regular architectonics, different levels of standardization, practices of parodying the standard).