USSR in Construction was a Soviet monthly illustrative news and propaganda journal, published from 1930 to 1941 as well as in 1949. The first issue was published with writer Maxim Gorky as its editor. The journal was primarily oriented towards an international audience and was released in five different languages. The 1949 attempt to revive the magazine in its pre-war format did not meet success and thus in 1950 the journal resumed publishing in a new format under the name of The Soviet Union. In the genre of illustrative news journals USSR in Construction was the precursor for the American magazine Life, which started publishing in 1936, and the Japanese journal Front, among others. In 1934 USSR in Construction began its independent production of the journal At the Construction Site of MTS and State Farms. Bernard Shaw, Herbert Wells. John Galsworthy. Roman Rolland and other representatives of the western left intelligentsia were all among the many subscribers to the magazine. According to Edmond Willson even anticommunists such as Sydney Hook gave into the “hypnotic photographs of tractors and hydroelectric stations”. The magazine was designed in a constructivist style. The most distinctive feature was the wide use of the photographic scale of contrasts. The magazine was printed on a rotogravure-printing machine. Special editions were created with even more sophistication and originality. Thus, the issue dedicated to the XVII reunion of the VKPB (Communist Party of Bolsheviks) was wrapped in a piece of cloth from the stratospheric balloon USSR-1, which had set a new world flight record by reaching the height of 19 kilometers; the issue in 1934 was covered in shellac; and the issue dedicated to flight ANT-20 “Maksim Gorgky” had an aluminum foil cover. In 1936 leaf gold was used for the release of an issue dedicated to Georgia. El Lissitzki, Alexander Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova, Roman Karmen, George Petrusov, Boris Ignatovich, Arkady Shaikhet, Evgeny Haldey, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Max Alpert, Dmitri Debabov, John Heartfield and many other worked on illustrations for the journal, while Maxim Gorky, Isaak Babel, Michael Koltsov, Eduard Tisse and Sergei Tretyakov wrote the pieces accompanying the illustrations.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 06:17:10 +0000
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