Like all great revolutions, the October Revolution of 1917 operated like a nuclear explosion: dissolving the established social, economic, and cultural order, it unleashed unprecedented creative forces with the declared goal of building a new culture, creating a new socialist society, and shaping a new type of human being, a new collective subject, based on the principles of social equality and progress.

Visual artists and architects, writers, and people from theater and cinema, among them Kazimir Malevich, Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and his partner Varvara Stepanova, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin and his brothers Leonid and Viktor, Ivan Leonidov, Konstantin Melnikov, Moisei Ginzburg, and many others, committed themselves to the realization of this new vision and captured through their complex works and manifestos the goals of the new revolutionary art; suprematism, constructivism, utilitarianism-productivism, rationalism, and formalism were the artistic movements that fueled the sweeping tide of Soviet avant-garde or Soviet modernism for about fifteen years after the Revolution, before the imposition of Stalinist orthodoxy.

The study by Konstantinos Xanthopoulos does not limit itself to an aesthetic evaluation of this multifaceted movement, the significance of which has only begun to be appreciated in its true dimensions in recent decades. After examining the historical, social, ideological, and aesthetic background of this creative explosion, the osmotic exchange of ideas and trends, and the dialogue, at least in an initial phase, between the Soviet and Western avant-garde, it highlights the revolutionary work mainly of the architectural avant-garde as the quintessential field for the synthesis of the arts, science, and new social ideas.

An important contribution of the study is among other things the presentation of the work and operation of Vkhutemas and Vkhutein, the educational institutions established after the Revolution with the vision of a synthetic approach to architecture and various expressions of art and their organic interconnection with industrial production and the needs of the new society.