"USSR in Construction": From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realist Aesthetics

This study of the magazine SSSR na stroike ( USSR in Construction) examines the persistence, modification, and transformation of Soviet avant-garde representational practice in light of the emergence of Socialist Realism during the early 1930s. This monthly magazine propagandized the progress of the transformation of the Soviet economy, society and culture during the industrialization program initiated in 1928. With Russian, English, German, and French editions, the magazine's audience was domestic and international. Guided by an editorial board that included Maksim Gorky, Artemii Khalatov, Mikhail Kol'tsov and Georgii Piatakov, this magazine brought together the Party elite and leading cultural figures, including El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Sergei Tret'iakov, and served as a key vehicle in the formulation of Socialist Realism. Drawing upon diverse sources largely unexplored by previous scholarship, this dissertation uses the case of SSSR na stroike to examine the problem of continuity and change between avant-garde ideals of the 1920s and the formation of a distinct Socialist Realist visual culture in the following decade. Among the avant-garde ideas, practices, and examples that shaped this magazine are: Constructivist photographic theory, literature of fact, film montage, Dziga Vertov's theories, and John Heartfield's photomontages. This study begins by tracing the origins of SSSR na stroike to the Soviet Pavilion at Pressa in 1928 and to the magazine Nashi dostizheniia . The varied audiences targeted by the magazine, including Western industrialists and the Stalinist elite, are also examined. The origin of the Soviet narrative photo-essay (fotoocherk) is discussed, first with the publication of Arkadii Shaikhet and Maks Al'pert's "24 Hours in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family" in Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung and then with the appearance in SSSR na stroike of "Giant and Builder", the story of a worker at Magnitostroi. The changing representation of Dneprostroi in SSSR na stroike is employed as a case study in which the magazine's content is correlated to changing government policies and the contributions of American photographers Margaret Bourke-White and James Abbe are investigated. The work concludes with a re-assessment of Rodchenko's work at the White Sea Canal Construction project and his cultivation of the patronage of the Soviet secret police.