The Infrastructural Monument: Stalin's Water Works under Construction and in Representation

The task of monumentalizing the power of the Stalin regime was given to the Soviet infrastructure, and to the water works (canals, dams, and reservoirs) in particular. In the process, the Gulag labor camps were entrusted both with the construction of the canal system and the representation of Communism's power to transform nature. Leading Soviet authors enlisted avant-garde artists, including Alexander Rodchenko, into the representational propaganda campaign to formulate a new state geography and, with it, a new Soviet mentality. Through a series of journalistic publications, photographic essays, and utopian representations, the otherwise utilitarian infrastructure was brought into the aesthetic discourse of monument making. This representational campaign came to its conclusion in the work of the popular geographer, Nikolai Mikhailov, whose maps offered a unified image of the landscape transformed through politics.