Photo album of Kharkiv.

A significant collection of photographs taken by an American engineer in the early 1930s during the early industrialisation of Kharkiv, giving an important insight into Soviet Ukraine.

The album was compiled by an unnamed American engineer who was living in Kharkiv at some point between 1928 and the early 1930s. It includes a mixture of industrial sites (and factory interiors), modernist blocks of flats and intimate social gatherings at a time when Kharkiv was going through an intense period of rapid development. There is a striking contrast between the Constructivist architecture which was so groundbreaking at the time and the traditional clothing, wooden buildings, horse-drawn carts and milk yokes of the city's past. You can see the first skyscraper in the Soviet Union, the Derzhprom building towering over figures in the snow, impressive in its sheer scale, it was the most spacious single structure in the world when it was completed in 1928.

The American engineer was likely part of the 100 or so architects, engineers and draftsmen living and working in Kharkiv on behalf of Kahn Associates. They were tasked with building the Kharkiv Tractor Factory (KhTZ) as well as other buildings and plants. One photograph shows the newly completed Sotsgorod quarters with a laundry line hanging across the unfinished construction site with a caption, 'our front yard in Kharkiv'. The vast majority of the 141 photographs are in Kharkiv but there are also a few in Moscow and Berlin, presumably en route back to America. A photograph in Moscow shows the Vladimirskie Vorota and Chapel of St Panteleimon the Healer, both of which were destroyed by the Soviets in 1934 thus dating the album somewhere between 1928 and 1934.

4to (30 x 21 cm); 36 leaves with 141 silver gelatin photographs loosely inserted, some with captions to verso in English in pencil; original leather album with oak leaf banner design to upper cover, some wear to spine but else in very good condition.