Death of the Dream

In the early 1930s, when communism still shone with the promise of a bright future, Margaret Bourke-White went to the Soviet Union to capture the seismic changes of a society bent on forging itself anew. The country was a mystery then, and her photographs and journal entries, excerpted here, laid bare the dedication and raw muscle fueling a blast furnace of a nation as it struggled out of feudalism. Sixty years later, TIME invited Anthony Suau to retrace Bourke-White's journey. If her pictures were the positive, his are the negative. The Russia that emerges from Suau's frames is a land of...