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[CONSTRUCTORS OF THE NEW WORLD] Liudi 30-kh godov [i.e. People of the 30s]

Zhukov, Iu.

Item #1025

Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1966. 575 pp.: ill., 32 ill. 20,5x15,5 cm. In original illustrated full-cloth with lettering on the spine; in original illustrated dust-wrapper; illustrated endpapers. Very good, small fragment of the spine lost, covers slightly rubbed.
First edition.
Solomon Telingater’s later yet brilliant book design. Resembling the 1930s solutions, this book gained a double title-page with a photomontage of constructors balancing on scaffolding. This motif of crossed metal beams repeated on half-titles, as well as constructivist ‘beams’ spread throughout the edition. More than that, a pattern of scaffolding is printed on the covers. The front dust-wrapper also features the picture of some men climbed up a structure. The endpapers show portraits of significant people of this epoch like pilot Chkalov and poet Bezymenskii.
The book sought to enlighten readers on what was in the mind of the 1930s Soviet people and what aims they had. It gathered excerpts from reports and diaries supported with photos and illustrations of ‘the firsts’ appeared in that time: scholars, pilots and explorers, factories and hydroelectric stations, tractors, settlements and temporary structures, slogans and quotas. Together they might explain how the country raised and implemented first five-year plans.
The Far East journalist Yuri Zhukov dedicated the whole chapter of this work to the foundation of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. He included a kind of diary about the first months of its existence and photographs of the first workers’ club, canteen, nurseries. In 1976 he wrote a book devoted to the same and was criticized as far as he mentioned repressions.

Worldcat shows copies located in Princeton, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Texas, Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Ohio, Vanderbilt, Case Western Reserve, Pittsburgh, Western, Duke, Pennsylvania, John Hopkins, Cornell, Columbia, California, Fordham, Stanford, Washington, Brown, Nevada, Victoria Universities, Harvard and Amherst Colleges.

Price: $350.00