Private collection of Alyona Sokolnikova

My professional interest in Soviet design history inspired me to start my own collection. In Russia, private collectors seek to preserve their own vision of the cultural heritage they collect and have little trust in the state’s ability to properly preserve and represent it. Due to neglect at the state level, many archives have been lost since the 1990s. Today, it is possible to reconstruct this history only with the help of the private archives preserved by the designers’ families.
My own collection includes photographs and prototypes of designs that never went beyond the mock-up stage—ones that I obtained directly from the authors—along with various Soviet mass-produced items, the authorship of which I am trying to identify. I find the Sputnik samovar particularly interesting because it is based on a sketch by a famous artist. The design is dated 1974, when the space-age craze was already over, but it is still a fine specimen of the era, one that manifests a playful postmodernist take on form. The samovar’s production was technically demanding, so it remained a limited edition that is now a collector’s item.