5 Piatiletka. (The Five-Year Plan) by A.M. Laptev - 1930

Quarto 20x18 cm . Original wrappers, in 20 foldout accordian pages. A rare complex Constructivist panorama promoting the vast industrial progress of Stalin's Five Year Plan through maps, charts, isotopes and flaps that fold out as an engaging V-shaped visual essay on the contemporary economic state of the USSR. It can be read in two directions. The first way, from Laptev's vantage point, "the reader finds three maps: one for the electrification of the country, the second for the construction of factories, and the last for the collectivization of farms. Through these maps, young readers become familiar with a synchronic view of the Five-Year Plan ... Turning the book over and starting from the back cover, the reader is presented with targets for ten aspects of Soviet industry: electricity, factory construction, iron, coal, oil, the chemical industry, bread production, forestry, transportation, and culture. Laptev illustrates the situation before the implementation of the 1927-28 Five-Year Plan with both the text and pictures. Aleksandr Mikhailovich Laptev (1905-1965) was a gifted Soviet avant-garde graphic artist and graduate of VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN. Text by Konstantin Fedotovich Piskunov (1905-1966) - secretary of the State Publishing House, editor of the publishing houses Molodaia gvardiia and Destskaia literatura. The reader is invited to open the flaps on the pages to unfold the dramatic changes caused by implementation of the Five-Year Plan in each of these industries" (Duda, Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary, Univ Chicago exhibition 2011, item no 1). An unusual Soviet production book. 8000