1.
It was a July day in 1928. Writer Sergei Tretyakov was on the way from Moscow to North Caucasus. As a former “egofuturist” and one of the founders of the Left Front of the Arts (Lef), he could hardly forgo the opportunity of an airplane flight. The author remained excited even though the flight was interrupted by an emergency landing in Kharkiv—from where Tretyakov continued by train to Pyatigorsk, and then by car to his destination, the collective farm Communist Lighthouse, or Kommayak. For him, the flight was not simply a logistical, but a transformative, world view–changing experience.1 The view from the airplane defamiliarized the landscape, turning the earth into a living organism, just as it had presented itself to Alexander von Humboldt a century earlier, and would appear to James Lovelock later still. No longer “the king of nature,” the human, Tretyakov believed, was reduced to a parasite “inhabiting the earth’s crust and altering its appearance most visibly among such forces as water, moles, and weeds”:
Weeds in the fields spread in circles, like eczema. Individual plants are nowhere to be seen; instead, plant species live in rings, films, and blisters. Changes in the color of the soil catch the eye. There are no protagonists. There are active processes. Scenes of jealousy, fights, and embraces of heroes are invisible from here, and the villages are uniform, like the leaves of a shrub of a single species. But from here one can see the economic regions [khoziaistvennye raiony], the richness of harvests and the bony leanness of crop failures. From here one can see the diseases of districts, the abscesses of regions, the anemia of rivers. A tiny grain pest that withers entire hectares into a dead yellow is more visible and more menacing from here than the mockingly tiny, mute object puffing alternately white and black smoke, which on the ground is called a locomotive.2
Evaluating the scale of the grain pest infestation through the “inverted binoculars of flight,” Tretyakov fancied himself a doctor who could diagnose disease by observing its symptoms.3 The airplane window became the lens of a medical instrument, looking through which he could detect the root cause of a skin condition that remained unexplained for the myopic earth-bound observer. This cause was the economy. Tretyakov’s elevated position in the airplane responded to the god’s-eye perspective taken by the State Planning Bureau, Gosplan, which was then coming to the forefront of Soviet economic policy in the age of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32).
Adam Smith used the metaphor of the “invisible hand” to define the seemingly magical self-regulating mechanism of the market; and in the 1920s, South African naturalist Eugène Marais described a termite mound as an “animal made of hundreds thousands of animals,” which possessed a transindividual “soul.”4 Not satisfied with such magical explanations of either the economy or the workings of nature, Tretyakov instead insisted that the “biological-termite works of the human” represented a mere animalistic stage that preceded geoengineering.5 What was to come next was a conscious, scientific stage of planning. As Karl Marx famously noted, “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”6 By the late 1920s, the transition from the collective unconscious to a conscious, historical subjectivity became the fundamental teleological program at the core of Soviet aesthetics.7
According to Tretyakov, creation was to supersede evolution.
2.
More than an economic remedy, rational land use was, for Tretyakov, the only truly aesthetic—the sole creative—kind of engagement with nature: “There is nothing worse than looking at the world around you through the eyes of a consumer. And all old art is based on a consumer’s perception of the world. Landscape [painting] is nature seen through the eyes of the consumer.”8 These words would later be echoed by Tretyakov’s friend, the film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose manuscript Nonindifferent Nature (written in the 1940s) concluded that the human “recreates the world … not with indifference, but with passion, actively and creatively.”9
Tretyakov and Eisenstein developed these ideas in collaboration, when in the 1920s they both studied Rudolf Bode’s theory of expressive gymnastics, which connected the movements of the body to the inner impulses of the soul. According to Eisenstein, cinematic landscape expressed the soul of nature through its manifested motion. The beats of the hearts of nature and of its human organizer were harmonized with the help of what Eisenstein called landscape’s musicality. He found examples of such musicality in Chinese landscape painting, which he largely saw through the eyes of Tretyakov (who had lived in China in 1924–25). In Chinese painting, Eisenstein mused, “Variety is achieved by a refinement of compositional methods rather than by increasing the number of objects; they are usually confined to a river, lake, cliffs, mountain chains, waterfalls, trees of a certain type, thatched-roof cottages, and details of monasteries.” Despite this limited number of natural and constructed forms that appear in Chinese art, its composition creates a “musical effect”—an emotional reaction “achieved not only by a set of representational elements of nature but especially and mainly by the musical development and composition of what is represented.”10 According to Eisenstein, the artist could play the music of landscape by recombining its elements and, in doing so, move the beholder to recreate the world.
Tretyakov and Eisenstein aspired to “recreate the world” by recomposing its elements.
3.
As Tretyakov was gazing down through the airplane window, Eisenstein was working on The General Line, a film that in a similarly wishful way celebrated the promise of collectivization. Begun in 1926, the film, however, quickly lost its political momentum. It was ultimately released in 1929 as The Old and the New, but was shelved almost immediately for being too formalist and for presenting the Soviet countryside in too dark a palette. The opening minutes show the wounds of strip farming—the legacy of the old community (obshchina) land ownership model, under which each family was allocated several disconnected strips of farmland. The protagonist, Marfa, an unmarried bednyak (impoverished peasant) woman, loses her only cow when she is forced to use it for plowing the land. With nothing left to lose, she initiates cooperation with her fellow villagers, encouraging everyone to merge their plots and take out a joint loan for the purchase of machinery. Together, they are able to acquire a cream separator, then a breeding bull, and eventually a tractor. The dairy collective evolves into a bovine state farm where cows, somewhat surreally, become the inhabitants of elegant Corbusian villas (filmed on a stage set created by constructivist architect Andrei Burov). The film ends with a round dance of tractors in the collective fields, a powerful aestheticization of cooperation—and a ridiculously useless activity in the opinion of two of the film’s critics, the satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov.11
The main reason for the film’s unfortunate fate was that in 1929, when the production was finished, the politics of collectivization had changed. In 1926, this politics had relied on the theorist and politician Nikolai Bukharin’s “right-wing” vision for a “snail’s pace” of collectivization. Bukharin believed that the peasantry would gradually integrate with industry “to form a single, planned, industrio-cooperative economy.”12 While 1926 saw the peak of agricultural production (which almost reached its prerevolutionary levels), it also marked the start of a new decline of both tillage area and productivity: in North Caucasus, only 88 percent of the formerly tilled area was sown in 1928, while the grain harvest remained at 62 percent.13 Meanwhile, the population of the Soviet Union was steadily increasing, with half a million households added each year. This situation evolved into the grain procurement crisis of 1928, caused by the peasants’ reluctance to sell their grain at state-mandated prices, which were out of sync with the high prices for industrial goods. To lower the price of industrial goods, the state had to invest in industrialization—and to do so, it had to extort even more, and more violently, from the land and its workers. If until 1929 the scale of collectivization remained insignificant, now the government made what historian Moshe Lewin dubbed “the Great Turn.” This was a shift towards the intertwined goals of a class war against the prosperous peasants (the kulaks) and a total (sploshnaia) collectivization.14
The fate of Eisenstein’s The General Line illustrates the abrupt change of the scale and speed of collectivization at the end of 1929.
4.
At the conference of agrarian Marxists in December 1929, Joseph Stalin announced the creation of the Narkomat (Ministry) of Agriculture under the direction of Yakov Yakovlev. It was Yakovlev’s speech at the 16th Congress of the Communist Party that Tretyakov reported diligently studying in Kommayak.15 The question of what the optimal size of industry should be was now resolved with a simple formula: the bigger the better. The new farms were supported by machine-tractor stations, each serving a ring of surrounding villages. Simultaneously, agronomists, organizers, managers (and writers) were dispatched to collective farms to solidify state control over the production and procurement of grain.
Two new types of agricultural enterprise had been brought about by the Russian Revolution. The first, the sovkhoz (Soviet, or state, farm), was founded on nationalized land and belonged to the state. Its workers were paid employees. Although later the model was applied on a broader scale, it never became dominant. The second type, the kolkhoz (collective farm), was a cooperative of peasants who shared land, equipment, and labor. Unlike the workers at Soviet farms, collective farm workers did not receive wages but were instead shareholders in these autonomously managed enterprises. Despite the political challenge that such an autonomy presented for the totalitarian state, kolkhozy remained the privileged form of collectivization for a practical reason: they were left to take care of their own survival. These kolkhozy could be of three kinds. The weakest form of collectivization was the association for the joint tillage of land (ATL): here, pulling animals and farm equipment were shared seasonally. The second form was artel, in which land, pulling animals, and machinery were collectivized, but each family retained its individual vegetable garden, pigsties, and chicken coops. The third, and the most highly integrated, form of association was the commune, in which everyday life, including meals and the upbringing of children, was collectivized. Communes emerged from the zeal of the revolutionary years but never became prevalent; the weakest form, the ATL, was more common until the arrival of Stalin’s forced collectivization in 1929, which instead relied on the artel model. As a commune, Kommayak was thus exceptionally radical, uniting committed and voluntary members. As such it was a catalyst of collectivization. This was an ideal setting for Tretyakov’s factography—an aesthetic practice based on photographic and journalistic documentation—not because the setting was typical but precisely because it was not.
Tretyakov’s factographic method aimed to document life in Kommayak as the model for collectivization.
5.
It was in Kommayak—to which he would repeatedly return over the next two years—where Tretyakov transformed his earlier program of “factography” into “operativism,” which aimed not to document but to create reality: “To put it simply: inventing something important is belletristic novelism; discovering something important is reportage; constructing something important is operativism.”16 The latter, Tretyakov explained, was brought to life by the First Five-Year Plan. While the theories of factography and operativism have been studied in depth by Maria Gough, Devin Fore, Tatiana Hofmann, and Susanne Strätling, what these studies sidestep is just how closely Tretyakov’s thought followed the changing politics of the Communist Party: after the Great Turn, political “facts” were no longer the same. In a speech delivered in December 1929, Stalin proclaimed: “Comrades! The main fact of our social and economic life at the present moment, the fact that draws everyone’s attention, is the fact of the colossal growth of the collective farm movement.”17 As Tretyakov reported, if in 1928 only 1 percent of peasant households was collectivized, by 1931 collectivization reached 60 percent of households.18 Had Stalin’s speech been given a year later, it would have been mere “reportage,” but in 1929 it was operativism. Performing a sleight of hand by conflating temporalities, this speech identified fact with the plan, positing the latter as an instrument of synchronizing the present and the future. To be materialized by decree, this fact was a fetish.
Tretyakov’s operativism was an aestheticization of Stalin’s new concept of planning.
6.
In the 1920s, the steppes of North Caucasus presented a complex social, ethnic, and religious landscape. They encompassed mixed Russian and Ukrainian urban and rural settlements; Armenian neighborhoods; Cossack stanitsas; villages of the local Muslim peoples (the Nogays, the Kabardins, and the Karachays); settlements of German Baptist colonists; and outposts of newly arrived settlers who had been displaced by the revolution and the Civil War. Kommayak’s roots go back to 1903, when entrepreneur Egor Karpushin founded a prosperous sheep-breeding farm in this ethnically diverse, recently colonized region.19 After the revolution, Karpushin not only donated the farm to the commune but also left a hefty endowment, which the commune used for purchasing cattle and equipment, and for expanding the farm. When founded in 1920, the commune included forty-seven people, among them local peasants, demobilized soldiers, and former agricultural wageworkers, who collectively owned sixteen horses, twenty bulls, twelve milk cows, and thirty-two sheep. In 1922, this commune merged with a neighboring commune to form Kommayak. In 1923, Kommayak rented a tractor; a year later, it built a brick factory and a cheese factory, and acquired three more tractors. The orchard was planted in 1925, and sheep and poultry farms were founded in 1928. This exceptional prosperity and dynamism brought Kommayak national awards and fame. And while the turn to total collectivization heightened this fame, it was also what ended Kommayak’s growth.
The first collective farms had been created as outposts on confiscated lands, and used confiscated machinery. Having to defend their possessions during the Civil War, these farms, in Tretyakov’s words, resembled “small Soviet fortresses, where in comradely labor and stiff military discipline the first cadres of agricultural collectivists strengthened, fending off the enemies.”20 By the end of the decade, “the kolkhoz-fortress and the kolkhoz-outpost have been replaced by the kolkhoz-village. The kolkhoz-village is formed in an existing village and often unites all of its peasants minus the kulaks.” And turning to the future, in which he foresaw Stalin’s total collectivization, Tretyakov added: “And from this there is a direct path to the transformation of all Soviet countryside into one single kolkhoz.” In 1929, all villages around Kommayak were forced to collectivize, and the fifteen collective farms were united to form the combine Challenge (Vyzov), under Kommayak’s leadership.
At this time, the combine emerged as the new privileged form of economic association: a combination of diverse industries that supported each other in the production cycle to ensure the optimal use of resources and labor. Rural combines encompassed different types of agriculture, sometimes supported by small-scale industrial production. Combines were conceived on the regional scale, but the chains of the combine network were dispersed in space. They were inscribed into the program of Soviet planning, which divided the country into a series of economic regions and micro-regions, each with a distinct economic profile, determined by environmental conditions, natural resources, population, and infrastructure.
Economic planning was a tool of both assembly and fragmentation: the enormous scale of the Five-Year Plan made people appear as fragments of the mass, and villages as fragments of the combine and the region. The division of labor provided the principle behind the economic specialization of regions and the association of industries within combines. Upon being separated, the processes of work and life were to be reorganized in a modern, rational way. According to Tretyakov,
A year or two ago, Ivan sat in his hut, where everything was together: calves, sheep, children, and a plow with harnesses. The stove cooked food, steamed the master, and warmed the sick. At the table, lunch, study, festive drinking, and harness repair; food, onions, potatoes, cabbage are also laying around … An “integrated” household.
And so the collective farm and the machine-tractor station laid a new foundation for the hut, and the stove with its pots goes to the collective dining room, the public bathhouse, and the communal hospital. The children go to the nursery. The piglets and calves, to collective barns. Drinking parties dissolve into the work of the club. The tools are removed to the machine shed, onions and potatoes to the public canteen. All that remains is a bed and a chest of drawers with some belongings.21
As its name suggests, the combine sought to recreate the world by recombining its elements: it was in this organizational act of recombination rather than in the spatial act of building that wealth was expected to magically emerge. The creation that Tretyakov postulated as the principle of operativism was unraveled as recombination. Ilf and Petrov satirized this promise in their novel The Twelve Chairs (1928), where they described the adventures of a swindler who called himself “the great combinator.”
As an instrument of planning, the combine was less a spatial than an organizational entity.
7.
A 1930 plan for the Vyzov combine shows villages, dirt roads, the rivers Kura and Gorkaya Balka, an irrigation canal (likely constructed before the revolution), a telephone cable (to be use only for communcation related to the Tuapse-Grozny oil pipeline—it could not be used by the farmers), and the future canal development trajectory.22 Turning this assembly of fifteen villages into one economic and political micro-region, the combine’s management had to ensure its autonomy, and to regulate both the connections between its members and its vertical connections with larger-scale bodies.
Tretyakov, who sat on the combine’s board, chose for himself the job of cultural and ideological consolidation—of constructing an information network sustained by newspapers, cinema, and other forms of political entertainment. This task was all the more important since, unlike the committed members of Kommayak, most members of Vyzov were collectivized by force. Having no means to build cultural amenities in the villages or even to enable the peasants to travel within the combine for such purposes (there were no paved roads, buses, or automobiles), Tretyakov invented the kultfurgon (culture van). This was an improvised mobile infrastructure that a horse pulled from one settlement node to another, carrying radio, cinema, books, music, newspapers, exhibition stands, and human organizers. Like the combine itself, the culture van was to grow and develop in the future. It became a moving and sprawling mechanism that organized the villages—still economically discreet—into a single organism.23
The graphical form of this organization was the diagram—the modern organizational device favored by the adepts of scientific management.24 Like the diagrams of economic connections between regions and industries, it broke down work into an ornament of tasks and processes, mapping the links and interdependencies among them. Although the diagram marked a transition from factography to operativism, it was no work plan. By abstracting reality and disregarding scale, the diagram essentialized the plan and combined the real with the nonexistent. It was an ideal medium for the representation of “facts”—a tool of command economy.
The culture van and the diagram were the mechanism and the representational form—the construction and the composition—of the combine.
8.
Despite its fame and ambition, the Vyzov combine was a far cry from this vision of modern and efficient living. As Tretyakov had to admit, “It looked like an adventure of an architect-builder of socialist cities, who developed the plan of construction from concrete, glass, steel, and linoleum, but was left alone with the sole construction materials—earth, hay, and reed.”25 This statement was hardly an exaggeration: low-cost and low-tech and other improvised materials and DIY construction were at this time preferred and encouraged for socialist construction in the countryside. Tretyakov describes an invention that was a point of pride for Kommayak—an improvised brick factory, which consisted of two mobile ovens that were dragged between their sources of fuel, threshed haystacks.26 The Great Turn and the accompanying move from factography to operativism, which made Tretyakov leave the fortress of Kommayak and venture into the wider world, bastardized even his favorite medium of reportage (and by extension, himself): Dziga Vertov’s “man with the movie camera” now turned into “the uncle who shoots” (diad’ka, kotoryi snimaet).27 Indeed, Tretyakov spent more time taking photographs of peasant girls than documenting their work in the fields.
In her analysis of postindependence architecture in India, Ateya Khorakiwala introduces the notion of substitution, or the exchangeability of materials and even ideas in development economies.28 In contrast, rather than substituting construction materials (“surkhi instead of cement, or bamboo instead of steel”), the Soviet approach recombined them in space and time: steel and cement for factories, straw and earth for housing and the countryside. Here, magic lay not in making preindustrial materials perform modern functions or appear modern, but in making one see them as modern by inscribing them into the plan’s economy of scale. While the diagram substituted for space, the plan—the diagram of the market—substituted for the market itself.
Economic planning acted as a substitute for industrial production.
9.
Beholding the skin of the earth from above, Tretyakov was fascinated by its ornamental quality, created by geometry and material:
A flight lays out an astonishing geometry of fields—the geometry of human labor, which has lined the earth and colored parallelograms, rectangles, and trapezoids with the paints of various crops. This drawing’s sections have different faktura: one worked by a harrow, another by a plow, a third is marked by the green broadtail fur of forests, a fourth blotched with the soaking lichens of swamps.29
Like Siegfried Kracauer, who in 1927 described the performance of the British dance troupe the Tiller Girls as “the mass ornament”—in which legs and arms separated from individual bodies to form novel, ephemeral figures—Tretyakov saw the earthly organism coming to life from the ornaments that were made visible through the lens of the flight.30
Yet the “inverted binoculars” though which Tretyakov looked down were a different kind of instrument than the kaleidoscope, favored by the Frankfurt School thinkers.31 For Kracauer, “The ornament resembles aerial photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather appears above them”—just as Chinese painting turned nature into a system of whimsical ornamental patterns (here, Kracauer explained, “trees, ponds, and mountains are rendered only as sparse ornamental signs drawn in ink,” while “the organic center has been removed”).32 Where Kracauer was fascinated by the phantasmagoric potential of the mass ornament, Tretyakov pursued an opposite ambition: if the German thinkers, following Max Weber, sought for ways of counterbalancing capitalist rationalization by reenchanting the world, Tretyakov was (still) more interested in demystifying and rationalizing the world by educating himself “to read this cipher of geology, agronomy, botany, and land management.”33 In Germany, industrialization was a reality; in the Soviet Union, an economic goal. Kracauer was not impressed.
When the two met at Tretyakov’s lecture in Berlin 1931, where he presented his collective-farm writings, Kracauer snubbed the Soviet writer as a “literature-brigade Unteroffizier”: that is, as a military man, trained to obey rather than to think, whose mindset is too straightforward and simplistic, and is hence (and this was the worst) completely foreign to dialectics. “If anyone is a fetishist, then he. A fetishist of a worldview that may perhaps be useful for the realization of the Russian Five-Year Plan, but that does not rise to the level of European consciousness and has scarcely anything to do with Marxism.”34
Kracauer pointed out the fetishism of operativism.
10.
Kracauer was a master of dialectical ambiguity—for him, mass ornament could simultaneously be conscious (since the dancers clearly were in control of their motion) and unconscious. Unlike him, Tretyakov (as well as other Soviet theorists) relied on a Manichaean set of irreconcilable binaries: the proletarians and the bourgeois, the bednyaks and the kulaks, the old and the new. And even though the more sympathetic Walter Benjamin, who discussed Tretyakov’s work in detail in “The Author as Producer” (1934), saw it as an attempt to sublate the opposition between literature and life through the category of construction (an attempt that would be enshrined as the definition of the avant-garde by Peter Bürger), in reality Tretyakov remained more interested in ways of seeing than in construction.35
Development—an alchemical transmutation of poverty into wealth—relies on a certain measure of magic. Under capitalism, this magic rests on the sleights of market exchange. When those mechanisms faltered in 1928, the Soviet Union instead turned to the direct extortion of wealth. The magic of the plan, which created an ornament of seemingly malleable economic patterns and interconnections, was no more than a fetish that masked this extortion. The result was the famine that swept across the Soviet countryside in 1930–33. And it was bitterly ironic that Tretyakov, who had glorified the sacrifice of the “kulaks” on the altar of planning, in 1937 was himself arrested and executed as a “Japanese spy.” He was consumed, as it were, by the cult he had helped to create—the final triumph of fact over reality.
By aestheticizing the plan, Tretyakov’s operativism was an instrument of the cult that masked the extortion of wealth from the countryside.
On the role of airplane photography in the modernist imagination, see Sonja Dümpelmann, Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (University of Virginia Press, 2014). On Tretyakov’s time at Kommayak, see Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006); Martin Krenn, “Sergei Tretyakov: Field Commanders,” Rab-Rab Journal, September 2015; Tatiana Hofmann and Susanne Strätling, “Sergei Tretyakov: Pisatel’ kak puteshestvennik,” in Ot Pekina do Pragi: Putevaia proza 1925–1937 godov. Ocherki, “marshrutki,” “put’fil’my” i drugie putevye zametki, ed. Tatiana Hofmann and Susanne Strätling (Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo Universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2020); and Devin Fore, Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Sergei Tretyakov, “Vyzov: Kolkhoznye ocherki” (1930), in Ot Pekina do Pragi, 199–201. All translations mine unless otherwise noted.
Tretyakov, “Vyzov,” 199.
This was the summary of Marais’s research in a German magazine. See Spyros Papapetros, “Magic Architecture: Sources, Disciplines, and Objects,” in Frederick Kiesler, Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing, ed. S. Papapetros and Gerd Zillner (MIT Press, 2025), 24.
Tretyakov, “Vyzov,” 201.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1976), 284.
For more on the role of teleology in the Soviet theory of the time, see the Conclusion (“History: From the Monistic to the Terrestrial”) in Alla Vronskaya, Architecture of Life: Soviet Modernism and the Human Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
Tretyakov, “Vyzov,” 196.
Sergei Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature,” in Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 396.
Eisenstein, “Nonindifferent Nature,” 225–26.
Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, “1001‑ya derevnya (‘Starye i novye,’ fil’ma Sovkino: rabota rezhisserov Eisensteina i Aleksandrova),” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5 (Gosudarstvennoe izd‑vo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961) →.
Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (Northwestern University Press, 1968), 137.
Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 173.
Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 446. See also The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, ed. Lynne Viola et al. (Yale University Press, 2005).
Sergei Tretyakov, “Mesiats v derevne (iun’-iul’ 1930 g.) Operativnye ocherki,” in Ot Pekina do Pragi, 255.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006): 69. Tretyakov made four extended visits to Kommayak, spending a total of five months there. Gough, “Radical Tourism,” 159.
Joseph Stalin, “K voprosam agrarnoi politiki v SSSR: Rechʹ na konferentsii agrarnikov-marksistov, 27 dekabria 1929 g.,” Pravda, December 29, 1929 (no. 309), emphasis added. Available at marxists.org →.
Sergej Tretjakow, Feld-Herren: Der Kampf um eine Kollektivwirtschaft (Paco-Press, 1972), 14.
Tretyakov himself recounts the history of the farm. See Tretjakow, Feld-Herren, 88–107. See also Alexander Goncharenko, “V parke sovetskogo perioda: Ocherk iz Stavropol’skogo kolkhoza Kommayak, gde futurist Sergei Tretyakov vypuskal gazetu v 1930-kh,” Yuga.ru, July 17, 2024 →.
Tretyakov, “Mesiats v derevne,” 253.
Tretyakov, “Vyzov,“ 230–31.
The plan is reproduced in Gough, “Radical Tourism,” 163.
Tretyakov, “Mesiats v derevne,” 237–42.
Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism,” 166–67.
Tretyakov, “Mesiats v derevne,” 239.
Tretyakov, “Vyzov,” 214.
Tretyakov, “Mesiats v derevne,” 270.
Ateya Khorakiwala, “Floors and Ceilings: The Architectonics of Accumulation in the Green Revolution,” in Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South, ed. Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (Routledge, 2022), 344.
Tretyakov, “Vyzov,” 199.
Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Carsten Ruhl, Kracauer’s Architecture: The Ornamental Nature of the New Capitalist Order (M Books, 2022).
Georges Didi-Hubermann, “Im Angesicht der Zeit—Kaleidoskop und ‘Kopfzerbrecher’: Die Zeit schwingt sich wie eine Brezel …,” in Konstruktionen von Natur: von Blossfeldt zur Virtualität, ed. Angela Lammert (Verlag der Kunst, 2001).
Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” 77, emphasis in original.
Tretyakov, “Vyzov,” 199.
Siegfried Kracauer, “Instruktionsstunde in Literatur: Zu einem Vortrag des Russen Tretjakow,” in Russen in Berlin: Literatur, Malerei, Theater, Film 1918–1933, ed. Fritz Mierau (Philipp Reclam, 1991), 545–46.
Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” 77; Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Belknap Press, 2005), 771.