Russian Diary. 1927-1928

In the winter of 1927-1928, two young American art historians - Alfred Barr and Jerry Abbott - visited the Soviet Union. Shortly after returning from the trip, Barr became the director of the newly established Museum of Modern Art in New York, while Abbott became his deputy. While traveling through the USSR, they kept diaries that captured the cultural situation on the eve of the accelerated socialist construction and the end of the Russian avant-garde era. Barr and Abbott recorded their impressions from the novelties of theater and cinema repertoire, the inspection of museum collections nationalized by the new power, and meetings with prominent figures of Soviet culture: Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold, Moisei Ginzburg and Sergei Tretyakov, Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova.