Report of the XVII Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of January 26, 1934.

Stalin, I. [Report of the XVII Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of January 26, 1934]. Otchetnyi Doklad XVII S'ezdu Partii o Tabote TsK VKP(b) 26 Ianvaria 1934 g.

Book design by N. Sedel'nikov.

Moskva, Partizdat TsK VKP(b), 1935. 
8vo, 152 pp., ill. 

In original grey cloth. 
In good condition, lightly spotted to pages. 

One of several editions of Stalin's report, but uniquely illustrated.

The XVII Party Congress, nicknamed 'The Congress of the Victors' due to the economic successes of the First Five-Year Plan, was also referred to as 'The Congress of the Condemned'. Out of the 1,996 party members who attended the Congress, 1,108 were later arrested, with about two-thirds of them executed within the next three years.
The book design was crafted by Nikolai Sedel'nikov (1905-1994), one of the principal book and graphic designers in Soviet Russia. He studied at VKhUTEMAS, where he was a pupil of Rodchenko, Lissitzky, and Tatlin, and collaborated with Gustav Klutsis and Solomon Telingater. Sedel'nikov was one of the pioneers of new typography in Soviet Russia. He won the Grand Prix at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937 and the Golden Medal of the World Exhibition in New York in 1939 for the design of the USSR Constitution, together with S. Telingater and I. Rerberg.
The chief designer for the illustrations in this edition was Isaak Brodsky (1883-1939), one of the founders of the socialist realism movement. The book features numerous plates, mostly created by Nikolai Kochergin (1897-1974), a master of Soviet realistic political posters.
These types of books were censored after de-Stalinization, with portraits of Stalin and other attributes of the cult being removed.