Exploring Soviet Isotypes: Digitizing “The Struggle for Five Years in Four”
By: Jason Forrest
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, History, Books, Dvhistory

But first some backstory and context

There’s not a lot of information about the IZOSTAT. What I know comes from the definitive article, “Picturing Soviet Progress: Izostat 1931–4” written by Emma Minns from the Isotype archives at the University of Reading and explains much of the background. It is the story of a creative entrepreneur under the influence of opportunity and Otto Neurath was entranced by expansive budgets, vast Soviet resources, open political agreements, and a personal link with the famous Russian artist and designer, El Lissitzky.

The concept for the IZOSTAT began simply as a Rusian counterpart to Neurath’s Gesellschafts- und Wirstschaftsmuseum (the Social and Economic Museum in Vienna) in Vienna. Building on a friendly relationship between Austria and the USSR as well as the international acclaim of the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, Otto Neurath, Gerd Arntz, and Marie Reidemeister (who later married Otto) traveled to Moscow in 1931 to establish an organization for pictorial statistics. Otto was initially named the director of the institution, and his staff was to remain on hand to advise, despite being under the jurisdiction of the Soviet government.

According to a German/Russian newspaper, the institute was created to “devise pictorial statistics for newspapers, schools, business operations, and many other purposes. Special games, teaching aids and other tools of enlightenment will be developed. Exemplary museums and touring exhibitions are planned according to the Vienna Method and the construction of a large museum in Moscow is already being considered, along with the establishment of an Institute building with all the necessary test facilities.” It’s easy to see how the ambitious Neurath would see this as a great opportunity to spread his methods and ideas on an epic scale.

Original format of the document as individual cards

Credits from the inside front of The Struggle for Five Years In Four

Izostat mural on a Moscow apartment building from the magazine Prozhektor, 1934

Only a few months later, “The Struggle for Five Years In Four” was published as a folder of 64 statistical charts produced by the Izostat Institute and the State Publishing House of Fine Arts. It was a project designed to celebrate Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, which was accomplished in only four years — hence the title. The data was provided by Soviet officials, so it’s presumed to be more of a propaganda project than scientifically accurate.

This project was not credited to Neurath’s international team, but to Ivan Petrovich Ivanitskii, who was a practitioner of pictorial statistics before Neurath’s team arrived in Moscow. After admitting the Vienna method was superior to his own “film strip” method (which can be seen in charts 6, 14–16), he then learned Transformation from Marie and became her main “scientific collaborator.” Nevertheless, because this project was rushed to production it is a mix of the two approaches.

Ivanitskii was clearly cut from the same cloth as Otto Neurath, and was a passionate champion of pictorial statistics in the everyday lives of Russians. He went on to be credited for most of the IZOSTAT works through 1940 and his passion led to other projects outside of print media, including this IZOSTAT mural on a Moscow Apartment building and large posters in shop windows.

“The Struggle for Five Years in Four” also radically departs from the Vienna Method in a few substantial ways, mainly in its illustrative qualities. In the Russian version, Ivanitskii explains in a preface that the guide-pictures are to help the viewer understand the subject matter better, but it is clear that the illustrations also editorialize the overall objectives of the Five Year Plan. Factories, tractors, and microscopes all help to sell the presentation rather than embody or enhance the nuance of the data.

This is precisely what interests me about this work. These charts are attractive as well as persuasive. The stories they present are immediate, like most Isotypes, but they are also more entertaining. We can see Stalin’s Soviet realism encroach on the modernist aesthetics to amplify their message, even if it comes at the cost of statistical clarity. The imagery of the ‘story’ becomes the primary focus, not the data, not the design — but what it all represents to the Soviet people.

“The symbols used … suggest what they are meant to represent”

While this might strike some as an ethical compromise, Ivanitskii focuses on the representation of the statistics rather than the graphic formatting. The use of abstract icons would have been as unusual in Soviet Russia as they would have been in many parts of the world. A year earlier, Ivanitskii explained his design “not in the form of columns and tables of dry and boring numbers, but in the form of images or pictograms capable of exciting the interest of every worker in the Soviet Union.” The icons in these charts have personality, the charts have backgrounds that project ideals more than data.

To me, “The Struggle for Five Years in Four” stands as another path for what the Isotype could have become. Decades later, this work remains vibrant, interesting, and exciting! We see a hybrid of the Vienna Method with Russian flourishes that creates perhaps more personality than many of the Neurath’s own charts.

Ivanitskii says it best in his forward: