5 Piatiletka by LAPTEV, A.M - 1930

1930. LAPTEV, A.M. Piatiletka. [5 Year Plan]. Elaborate folding panorama, fully illustrated including maps & isotypes. 4to, preserved in original illustrated wrappers in a new cloth folding box. Moscow: GIZ, 1930. A fine copy of this rare complex Constructivist panorama produced by A.M. Laptev, a gifted Soviet avant-garde graphic artist and graduate of VKhUTEMAS-VEKhUTEIN. Created to promote the vast industrial progress of Stalin's Five Year Plan through maps, charts, "isotypes" and flaps that fold out to form an engaging visual essay on the then current economic state of the USSR. The panorama can be read in two directions: "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. 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, U. of Chicago exhibition 2011, No. 1).