Covering the first decades of the Soviet Union, from the Civil War to the end of Stalin's Second Five-Year Plan in the 1930s, the graphic works in Building the Collective provide a remarkable overview of design during one of this century's most politically turbulent and artistically active periods. These designs, from the collection of Merrill C. Berman, challenge assumptions of a monolithic Soviet poster style, conveying the impressive range of graphic design as it responded to a rapidly evolving political situation. Providing historical context and focusing on images of labor, industrialization, and technology, Building the Collective demonstrates how the ideological imperative of imagining a new collective society existed in a fertile and sometimes contradictory relationship with the artists' efforts to redefine their role in post-revolutionary Russia.