Tupitsyn challenges the view that the Soviet avant-garde peaked in the 1920s and was subsequently forced to conform with Bolshevik politics. Instead she asserts that photography during this period represented the last "great experiment" in the search for the most effective ways to connect art, radical politics, and the masses.

Investigating the means by which the new visual tools for disseminating revolutionary messages were adapted to the needs of Stalinist propaganda, Tupitsyn relates major examples of single-frame photography and photomontage to such events as the implementation of the New Economic Policy, Lenin's death, and Stalin's first and second Five-Year Plans, and to mounting censorship of the arts. She also establishes a link between the writings of critics and the development of photography and photomontage at this time.

The book presents previously unpublished material from Klutsis's letters, Rodchenko's public lectures, Lissitzky's late writings on the mass media, and Kulagina's personal diaries, as well as many previously unknown photographs.