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[CAUCASUS IN CONSTRUCTION] Severnyi Kavkaz na sotsialisticheskoy stroike [i.e. Northern Caucasus at the Socialistic Construction]

Item #438

Rostov-on-Don: izdanie Severo-Kavkazskogo Kraevogo Soveta voinstvuyushchikh bezbozhnikov, 1931. [128 pp.] 21x31 cm. One of 4500 copies. Original publisher’s cloth with lettering. Very good. Spine is restored, modern endpapers duplicating the original ones, some restoration of first pages.

Extremely rare photo-book showing the Northern Caucasus in construction.

The photographers are not mentioned in the edition, no bibliographies list it, also Worldcat doesn’t track this edition. The album is dedicated to the industrialization of the Northern Caucasus. Most of the buildings displayed are recently built. The areas covered are Rostov-On- Don, Chechnya, Dagestan, Krasnodar, Osetia, Taganrog, etc. The photos of the shock workers are used next to the interiors of new factories next to the production of the factories.

A significant part of the album is dedicated to the cultural and educational life of the region, for example we can find rare shots of Grozny workers’ club as well as newly build All-Union Oil Institute in Grozny. Also we can see the theatres, sanatoriums and the hospitals. All of the above were destroyed in the 1990s during Russo-Chechen wars.

These album is a very scarce photo documentation of the region that did not get a lot of coverage elsewhere. It’s particularly interesting from architectural point of view as a lot of almost unknown examples of the regional constructivist architecture are featured.

Photomontage is used extensively in the design of the book.

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