Aleksandr Rodchenko

(1891 - 1956)

15906

Oleg Leonidov

Первая Конная

The First Cavalry Army

Moscow: Ogiz, 1938

360 x 310 mm. 282 pages

Edition: 10,000. 

Second edition. Book design by V. Stepanova, photography by Aleksandr Rodchenko.In 1938, for the 20th anniversary of the Red Army, The First Cavalry Army was republished with consid- erable changes. As a result of the mass repressions of senior army personnel the bulk of the book was also reduced by a quarter. Here are a few of the differences: in the 1938 edition the double-page with photographs of cavalrymen in circles after the title page has disappeared; in the first chapter, "The Genesis of the Cavalry" seven pages of photographs devoted to the post-Brest-Litovsk German occupation of the Ukraine were removed; the gatherings on green paper containing poems by Demian Bedny, Alexei Surkov and Mayakovsky were removed; the last chapter, "The Cavalry Today", was much abridged; the photographs of Gamarnik, Tukhachevsky and Yegorov disappeared (leaving only Stalin and Voroshilov in the new edition); behind the portraits there was no longer a photomontage two-page spread with 24 photographs of the high command of the Red Army: corps and divisional commanders, corps and brigade commissars; there are no gatherings of half-height horizontal pages and no four-page fold-out montage of a cavalry parade flanked by portraits of Stalin and Voroshilov. One more interesting detail: the back cover of the 1937 edition is embossed with the information "Price 90 roubles"; the 1938 edition originally also had the figures 90, but they have been altered to 60 while the date 1937 is still standing.

References:

Karasik 2015, pp. 316-321