Rodchenko, Alexander, and Varvara Stepanova | A profusely illustrated Soviet propaganda photobook about the First Cavalry, complete with the rare original folder

Rodchenko, Alexander, and Varvara Stepanova

Pervaya Konnaia [i.e. The first cavalry]. Moscow: OGIZ, IZOGIZ, 1938

Folio (345 x 292 mm). Illustrated throughout using a variety of printing methods including photogravure, lithography, metallic, and relief printing, with illustrations and tipped-in plates, the tinted and black-and-white photographs are after Alexander Rodchenko, Arkadiy Shaikhet, Ivan Shogin, and others, and also with illustrations after historical posters, cartoons, drawings, maps, photo-collages, facsimiles of documents, and more; occasional light soiling in the margins, a few leaves strengthened in the gutter, corner creases to two tipped-in plates, some short edge tears, largely closed, a small pale dampstain at the head of the gutter affecting about 30 leaves, two facing leaves with a toned area (offsetting from a no-longer laid-in source). Publisher’s pale green coated cloth, front stamped in red and rear in blind; lightly soiled, wear to extremities, restorations to spine, with a moderate lean. Publisher’s pale green coated cloth folder with mounted photographs to exterior and interior; soiling and wear, a crack at rear hinge, professionally restoration mostly to the edges and spine, the folder a remarkable and rare survival.

Second edition of “one of the most sumptuous of Soviet propaganda books” (The Photobook, vol. I, pp. 170-171).

This profusely illustrated photobook celebrates the twentieth anniversary of one of the most storied formations in the early Soviet military—the First Cavalry Army. The Cavalry had been instrumental during Civil War battles, often making surprise attacks on the White Russian Guards.

Producing this book without a wealth of period photographs of the First Cavalry proved difficult. However, the husband and wife team of book designers, Rodchenko and Stepanova, solved this problem by using later photographs of the same regiment, as well as by reproducing period portraits of the Cavalry’s commanders, and various other documents from the collections of the Central Museum of the Red Army, including posters, caricatures, and telegrams.