Our Notes & References

A classic example of Constructivist graphic design, celebrating Soviet technology and the improvement of the lives of indigenous peoples around the Arctic Circle.

USSR in Construction was a Soviet monthly illustrated news and propaganda magazine published from 1930 to 1941 (and in 1949). The magazine was aimed primarily at a foreign audience and was published in five languages to promote the technological advancements of the USSR. Initially criticised as being “bland” and “obvious”, by 1932, avant-garde artists had helped it transform into a more stylised publication (cf. Dallimore and Heffernan). Under El Lissitzky [Lazar Markovich Lissitzky] (1890-1941), the famous Russian/Soviet artist, photographer and architect, the magazine increasingly incorporated the distinctive features of Constructivist design, such as photomontage, insert pages, and high contrast photography.

This issue is the third directly designed by Lissitzky. It celebrates the immense material wealth of the Arctic and its efficient exploitation by superior Soviet technology, with a full-page fold-out map marking the positions of gold, silver, oil and factories. The concluding leporello photomontage, “Through the Soviet Arctic”, shows the heroic crossing of the icebreaker Sibiriakov through the north-east passage in a single season, complementing the numerous smaller maps of Novaya Zemlya, Franz Joseph Land, and Bolshevik Island.

Great pains are also taken to emphasise the acculturation of the indigenous peoples (“Eskimos”) and their enfranchisement into the Soviet project, as per the korenizatsiia policy of the 1930s. Striking photographs depict indigenous peoples benefiting from modern Soviet medicine and education; the 1926 colonisation of Wrangel Island with Eskimo and Chukchi is also prominently featured. This is all in service of what Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), one of the magazine’s editors, described one of its main aims — the employment of svetopis (‘writing by light’, that is, photography) to “deprive our enemies inside and outside the Soviet Union of the opportunity to distort and discredit the testimony of words and numbers” (Dallimore and Heffernan).

Bibliography

Dallimore, Jonathon, and Elizabeth Heffernan. 2020. ‘”The USSR in Construction”: A Basic Research Guide for Teachers and Students’. Teaching History. Sydney; Milner, John, and Kirill Sokolov. 1979. ‘Constructivist Graphic Design in the U.S.S.R. between 1917 and the Present’. Leonardo 12 (4): 275–82; Rowell, Margit. 2002. Constructivist Book Design: Shaping the Proletarian Conscience; Wolf, Erika Maria. 1999. ‘”USSR in Construction”: From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realist Practice’.