Traveling in Russia and Central Asia in 1932–33, the German-Jewish portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi produced an extraordinary archive of several thousand photographs documenting Soviet industrialization, collectivization, modernization, and, most profoundly, the revolution's human face. Yet she never assembled a photo book or other reflection about her experience. Based on a study of the archive in its entirety, this essay tells the story of Jacobi's journey through the lens of her photographs, building a portrait of the worlds in which she moved under the auspices of the Soviet photo agency Soiuzfoto. It discusses her portrayal of a diverse array of workers, collective farmers, peasants, street traders, intellectuals, and political figures, first in Moscow and Michurinsk and then in the newly established socialist republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where she was hosted by leading indigenous communists such as Abdurahim Hojiboyev and Fayzulla Xo'jayev. The essay theorizes some of the key problems that her corpus raises: the relative weight of political commitment and external control in its production; whether it operates in a realist or mythic mode; the extent to which it presents Soviet Russia's role in Central Asia as that of a modernizing state or colonizing empire, as its tsarist predecessor had been; and the critical status of what she called “types” with respect to the nineteenth-century racist “type” photograph. A coda considers Jacobi's belated return to her Soviet corpus for the first time in the late 1950s and early '60s, a period characterized by a post-Stalinist thaw and the nominal end of the Red Scare in the United States, to which she had emigrated in 1935 in the wake of Hitler's appointment as chancellor and Germany's subsequent transformation into a one-party dictatorship.

Despite the fact that it was never realized at full scale, Vladimir Tatlin's long-lost model for his Monument to the Third International (1920) remains to this day the most widely known work of the Soviet avant-garde. A visionary proposal for a four-hundred-meter tower in iron and glass conceived at the height of the Russian Civil War, the monument was to house the headquarters of the Third International, or Comintern, the international organization of Communist, socialist, and other left-wing parties and workers' organizations founded in Moscow in the wake of the October Revolution with the objective of fomenting revolutionary agitation abroad. Constructed in his spacious Petrograd studio, which was once the mosaics workshop of the imperial Academy of Art, Tatlin's approximately 1:80 scale model comprises a skeletal wooden armature of two upward-moving spirals and a massive diagonal girder, within which are stacked four revolving geometrical volumes made out of paper, these last set in motion by means of a rotary crank located underneath the display platform. In the proposed monument-building, these volumes were to contain the Comintern's legislature, executive branch, press bureau, and radio station. According to the later recollection of Tevel' Schapiro, who assisted Tatlin in his construction of the model, two large arch spans at ground level were designed so that the tower could straddle the banks of the river Neva in Petrograd, the birthplace of the 1917 revolutions.

The extraordinary proliferation of political demonstrations around the world over the past several years has reminded us once again of the phenomenal power of the real-time convergence of people in public space, a power to which Diego Rivera's Moscow Sketchbook—a corpus of forty-five small watercolor drawings—bears graphic witness. The sketchbook dates from Rivera's seven- or eight-month sojourn in Moscow, which began in early November 1927 with his direct participation in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution as a delegate to the inaugural internat ional Congress of Friends. Publicly announcing the artist's arrival in Moscow on November 3, the Communist Party's national daily newspaper Pravda discussed his “extraordinary frescoes” in the new Secretar iat of Public Educat ion in Mexico City—which the poet Vladimir Mayakovski had earlier lauded as “the world's first Communist mural”—and went on to explain that, as a revolutionary artist, Rivera now prefers the collective address of “wall painting” over the private easel picture to which he had devoted himself for a decade or so in Paris before 1921. A new venture in Soviet cultural diplomacy, the Congress of Friends had as its objective the forging of a broad, cross-party international alliance of those willing and able to come to the defense of the Soviet Union in their home countries. Rivera, a member of the Mexican Communist Party at the time, participated in the congress at the invitation of the Comintern, which was responsible for hosting notable foreign communists when they were in town and, as such, played a major role in the organization of the three-day meeting. On the first day of the congress the artist was elected—from a pool of 947 delegates—to its Presidium (governing board) and press bureau as a member of the foreign intelligentsia.