Though they lived a century apart and wrote in starkly disparate historical, cultural, and literary contexts, Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Mayakovsky were both victims of the posthumous processes of bureaucratization and monumentalization at the hands of the Soviet regime. Their biographies, politics, and poetry were sanitized and manipulated...
In the early part of the 20th Century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union implemented a program of rapid industrialization under the slogan, “the conquest of nature by man.” Ambitious engineering projects such as the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Northern river reversal sought to restructure...