CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/29/2015

The Soviet Photobook 1920-1941

Featured spreads, from the early 1930s Soviet propaganda book Shock Workers (edited by Boris Malkin and Alexander Brodsky and designed by Valentina Khodashevich and Andrei Diderikhs), are reproduced from The Soviet Photobook 1920-1941, Steidl's remarkable new 636-page compendium. (See more spreads here.) "Shock working (working at high productivity, doing overtime or continuing to work after meeting your quota for no extra wages) was one of the main methods by which the first Five-Year Plans were accomplished. Unprecedented titanic labor in the mines, factories and fields and in the transport sphere created a new economy. The subjects of the photographs are workers and collective farmers; the shots were taken in the workplace or in the field. The faces are frozen and serious. Two years later this severity would be criticized and the heroes of labor began to smile."