CULTURE

Bright and beautiful

A volume called ‘Great Stalinist Photographic Books’ records a lost genre.

By Anna Malpas

Staff Writer

For The St. Petersburg Times A page from the Soviet-era coffee table book ‘10 Years of Uzbekistan’ celebrating the republic’s main crop — cotton.

Glossy and enticing, the Soviet photographic albums of the 1930s presented an airbrushed world in which the sausage was plentiful, the Young Pioneers sunned their bare bottoms at the Black Sea and milkmaids proudly showed off their record-breaking cows.

Such coffee-table books were usually produced in costly limited editions, destined for members of the nomenklatura and libraries. Their contents could be dry, as suggested by titles such as “The Industry of Socialism” and “On Rail Transport in the Soviet Union,” but the dynamic photographs and graphic design by artists including Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky could make even features on tractors or steel production look attractive.

In a new book, “Great Stalinist Photographic Books,” artist Mikhail Karasik goes through the genre from its origins in avant-garde experiments of the 1920s to its petering out in the 1940s, when such books generally became dull and pompous. Some of the books are well-known and highly collectable in the West, but they have been unfairly neglected in Russia until recently due to their political connotations, Karasik believes.

“These books were never collected by bibliophiles. They were considered very political and ideologized,” he said in a telephone interview. Many were given away during paper recycling campaigns in the Brezhnev era; others lay hidden in libraries’ “special” storage rooms, due to their abundance of images of Stalin.

This book, which was partly funded by the Federal Press and Mass Media Agency, is the first to systematize and reprint hundreds of page layouts and covers of the books. “I think the main point of this book is that we gathered them all together,” Karasik said.

The books came from libraries, Karasik’s own collection and museums such as the Sergei Kirov apartment-museum in St. Petersburg.

One of the most notorious books featured is “10 Years of Uzbekistan,” put together by Rodchenko and his wife, Varvara Stepanova, and published in 1934. Three years later, it was taken out of circulation because many of its featured heroes had been repressed.

The story was told in David King’s book, “The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia.” The writer looked at Rodchenko’s own copy, where many faces had been erased with black ink.

This book reproduces more than a dozen photospreads from “10 Years of Uzbekistan.” One shows a bare-chested harvester grinning as he hugs a mass of snowy cotton; in another a woman plays a grand piano, her hair hanging loose in a sign that she has rejected the traditional hijab. Fold-out pages reveal giant panoramas of cotton fields and mills, while the red endpapers are dotted with giant bolls of cotton.

Another book, “Belomor-Baltic Canal Named After Stalin” has become a byword for artistic compromise. Its authors, including novelist Alexei Tolstoi and the brilliant comic writer Mikhail Zoshchenko were dispatched to sing the praises of a project based on slave labor. But it’s rare to see pages from the book itself, designed by artists including Rodchenko and published in 1934. An embossed portrait of Stalin decorates the cover; inside are photographs of workers teeming over the canal bed and breaking rocks.

“All the portraits have been retouched. It’s hard to say who looks more frightening: the re-educated enemies of the people, wreckers and criminals worn out by work, or the leaders and educators from OGPU [a forerunner of the KGB],” Karasik writes.

For The St. Petersburg Times ‘Thank You Great Stalin!’ reads this photo-montage.

“In this book, there is a lot of politics, not because I wanted there to be, but because it was a time of politics,” said the author, who specializes in creating limited-edition artist’s books on themes such as Central Asia and the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms.

Despite the Soviet books’ political subtexts, they also stand out for their artistic verve.

Rodchenko and Stepanova added lift-up flaps to photographs in the 1938 book “Moscow Reconstructs,” so that you can look inside buildings or see hidden metro tunnels. In “The Workers and Peasants’ Red Army” from 1934, El Lissitzky gave whole pages to single images such as sailors throwing a basketball and created dramatic photocollages in the shape of a five-pointed star or the map of the Soviet Union.

“When I was researching the books in libraries, sometimes when I was given one and opened it up, I felt aesthetic pleasure, of course,” Karasik said.

Some of the books were produced in print-runs of as little as 1,000, while others went up to 50,000. They were generally very expensive. One, titled “Sausage and Smoked Meat” cost 250 rubles in 1938 - more than many people’s monthly salary. That 1938 book, apparently aimed at a trade audience, printed full-page drawings of delicacies such as “high-grade chequered glazed sausage” and included a price-list.

“That book wasn’t propaganda,” Karasik said. “You really could use it to put in an order.”

The least politically themed books are perhaps the most appealing, even though they also inevitably gloss over the deprivations and repressions of their time. Books on the All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow show photographs of record-breaking animals, including a cow called Orbit, and the rabbit-breeding pavilion, whose centerpiece was a model of a giant rabbit, surrounded by smaller offspring.

The oddly titled “Wives of Engineers” from 1937 has drawings of women mending cars and riding motorcyles while their children sleep and play with giant teddy bears in sunny kindergartens. In “Artek,” a book about the country’s most deluxe Young Pioneer camp on the Black Sea, children lie in orderly rows on the beach wearing only sunhats, splash in the sea and are served fruit by pretty cafeteria staff.

“Retouching was an obligatory rule for the photo-books, not even sparing children’s faces,” Karasik comments in the introduction.

An exhibition based on several of the books called “Books and Cinema” is showing at the Anna Akhmatova Museum (see Museums listing on page xi).

“Great Stalinist Photographic Books” (Paradnaya Kniga Strany Sovietov) is published by Kontakt-Kultura.

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