USSR in Construction

This project expands how researchers explore Soviet propaganda and industrial documentation from the 1930s using English copies of USSR in Construction magazines, one of the Soviet Union's premier periodicals documenting the sociopolitical goals, values, and aesthetics of the Stalin era, as source material. The project involved generating comprehensive metadata for 45 recently digitized issues of USSR in Construction using both authority control and locally developed metadata vocabularies tailored to Soviet historical context.

At the heart of this project is an interactive network visualization that reveals connections between themes, geographic locations, and key figures within the magazines during Stalin's first and second Five Year Plans (1928-1932 and 1933-1937, respectively). This period was characterized by extremely ambitious agricultural collectivization and heavy industry development efforts. Users can explore how Soviet industrial narratives evolved, discover geographic patterns of development projects, and trace the relationships between significant political figures, cultures, and industries.

This mixed information science and digital humanities approach offers alternative archival frameworks for making these rare materials accessible to educators, students, and researchers for the first time in digital format. The magazines were digitized, color-corrected, and made digitally navigable as part of this collaborative project, making one of modern history's first and broadest propaganda campaigns newly visible and discoverable. Rather than only browsing individual magazine issues, users can identify thematic clusters, track temporal changes, and uncover cross-references that illuminate the broader story of Soviet industrialization, ideology, and representation.

The project expands digital access through the Wende Museum's digital collections portal while demonstrating emerging methodologies for analyzing historical periodicals through network analysis and additional visualizations.

USSR in Construction emerged in 1930 as a premier Soviet propaganda periodical designed to showcase the dramatic industrial transformation occurring under Stalin's leadership during the First and Second Five Year Plans (1928-1932 and 1933-1937).12 Published monthly in multiple languages including English, German, and French, the magazine served as a sophisticated tool of international diplomacy, intended to demonstrate Soviet progress to foreign audiences while countering Western skepticism about communist economic policies. These ambitious industrial programs aimed to transform the Soviet Union from a predominantly agricultural society into a modern industrial state within a single generation, prioritizing heavy industry development, steel production, mining, and massive infrastructure projects like the White Sea Canal and the Moscow Metro.3 The publication's high production values, featuring striking photography, bold graphic design, and detailed technical documentation, reflected the Soviet Union's ambition to present itself as a technologically advanced nation capable of rivaling Western industrial powers.

Each issue of USSR in Construction typically focused on specific industrial projects, geographic regions, or cultural achievements, presenting them through carefully curated photographs, technical drawings, and explanatory text that emphasized progress, efficiency, and collective achievement.4 The magazine's visual rhetoric employed modernist design principles and heroic imagery to make industrial development appear both inevitable and desirable, transforming construction sites, factories, and workers into symbols of socialist success.5 Distributed to libraries, universities, and government offices worldwide, the publication functioned as both propaganda instrument and genuine documentation of an era characterized by extraordinary optimism about technological progress alongside the harsh realities of forced labor, political repression, and agricultural collectivization. While the magazine often omitted the human costs and setbacks of rapid industrialization, it provides invaluable insight into how the Soviet state sought to shape both domestic and international perceptions of its modernization project during one of the most consequential decades in modern history.

Digitization and Metadata Generation Process

We digitized 94 out of 156 total issues of USSR in Construction from the Wende Museum's collection, accounting for roughly 60% of the magazine's complete publication history spanning 1930-1949. Our focus on 1930-1935 captures the critical early Soviet period encompassing the first and second five-year plans before the Great Purges intensified. Digitization workflows included photographing, color correcting, and making the magazines digitally navigable using Issuu. Multiple technical approaches for visual and textual data extraction were employed post digitization. OCR converted scanned text into machine-readable format, enabling large-scale analysis across the corpus. We prioritized back pages and end matter to identify photographers, editors, and production credits—essential for mapping networks of cultural producers. Data cleaning through OpenRefine standardized inconsistent naming conventions, dates, and geographic references. This revealed translation and transliteration challenges with the materials, demanding careful attention to authority records and consistent naming practices.

Subject Headings and Authority Records

We developed a hybrid approach combining Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) with locally developed vocabularies for themes: industrial development (steel factories, infrastructure), social themes (collective farming, public health, women's roles), geographic locations across the USSR, and cultural figures (photographers, writers, designers). Name authorities presented challenges; Editor-in-chief A. Khalatov appears as "A. Halatov" or "Halatoff" across issues; photographer M. Alpert sometimes appears as "M.V. Alpert." We consulted VIAF records to establish standardized forms. Geographic authorities required historical context, with locations like Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, formerly Petrograd) needing temporal notation.

Organizing the Project

Rather than focusing narrowly on specific visual elements, we adopted a broader thematic approach creating a comprehensive dataset for diverse research questions about modern propaganda campaigns. This required developing frameworks for categorizing propaganda methods—visual versus textual approaches with further subcategorization within each type. The temporal focus on 1930-1935 captures the optimistic period of Soviet propaganda before political purges intensified. This timeframe encompasses the first five-year plan (1928-1932), during which USSR in Construction promoted state-led efforts, and the beginning of the second five-year plan (1933-1937), focused on heavy industry and technological modernization. File management presented ongoing challenges with large file sizes complicating data transfer between systems. We maintained both individual image files for OCR processing and consolidated PDFs for broader analysis, balancing technical requirements with research accessibility.

Why a Network

Network visualization effectively reveals complex interconnections between themes, locations, people, and temporal developments characterizing Soviet propaganda. Unlike traditional archival access systems, network graphs enable exploration of non-obvious connections and influence patterns across the magazine's content. The magazine presented a network of cultural producers; writers Maxim Gorky, Lev Kassil, and Isaak Babel; photographers Arkady Shaikhet, Max Alpert, and Yevgeny Khaldei; designers El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and Solomon Telingater. Understanding collaborative patterns across issues and themes requires visualization tools representing multiple relationship types simultaneously.

Network Structure and Connections

The network structure treats themes, locations, and issues of the magazine as interconnected nodes, with edges representing temporal co-occurrence, geographic proximity, collaborative authorship, and thematic similarity. This enables complex research questions about how Soviet propagandists defined and organized information, how different USSR regions were represented across issues, and whether themes like collective farming or industrialization varied over time. The network incorporates geographic analysis, mapping locations referenced or depicted in magazines and tracking infrastructure development across the USSR. This spatial dimension reveals how propaganda narratives were constructed around specific places and how the Soviet state projected power across its territory.

Technical Implementation and Presentation

We evaluated multiple visualization platforms—Cytoscape, Flourish, and Nodegoat—seeking to balance analytical sophistication with user accessibility. We found that Kumu provided robust network analysis, simple implementation, and metadata import capabilities. We also appreciated Kumu's capacity to embed images directly into network nodes. We created collaged banner images from visual elements from the magazines throughout the site that echo the magazine's distinctive layouts. This maintains visual consistency with the source material. The network and accompanying Python visualizations allows users to filter and search by topic, explore temporal changes, and trace geographic focus across the collection, creating a rich environment for research of these materials. We have also made our complete dataset of cataloged USSR in Construction magazines accessible to the public.

View our dataframe here!

This heatmap links themes to specific regions, but excluding Russia, to better highlight how the magazine used regional storytelling. For example, Kazakhstan is frequently tied to heavy industry, while Azerbaijan and Armenia appear tied to themes of collectivization and mining.

This heatmap tracks the frequency of major themes across the magazine's first five years. The consistent theme of "Labor & Workers" and "Heavy Industry" points to the central ideological commitments of the First and Second Five-Year Plans. Meanwhile, more intermittent themes such as "Aviation Technology" or "Children & Childcare" suggest shifting priorities or targeted campaigns. Visualizing the data this way reveals how USSR in Construction functioned as a flexible vehicle for reinforcing state goals.

This bar chart highlights the most frequently referenced locations across the issues. While Russia appears most often, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine are not far behind. The magazine didn't just report on infrastructure. It staged it across different regions to reinforce a sense of collective progress. This chart gives a sense of where the USSR chose to focus its narrative of development and modernity.