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.
