With the abandonment of painting they turned instead to the graphic and applied arts. The centrepiece of the Tate exhibition is a reconstruction of the Workers' Club Rodchenko designed for the 1925 International Exhibition in Paris. Workers' clubs, which sprang up across the Soviet Union, were intended for collective "improving" leisure at the end of the day - playing chess, reading newspapers, political discussion, etc. In Rodchenko's hands, the club was a place where design and ideology met. He dreamed up a clean, rational space with a hinged communal table that could sit flat or be inclined for reading; a red and black chess table with integral chairs; a collapsible rostrum that doubled as a screen for slogans. Ingenious though his designs were, the clubs were necessary because housing conditions were so poor that the authorities were keen that the workforce should have somewhere other than home to go to.

Rodchenko and Popova's most striking work, however, was in graphics. They produced a stream of photographic essays, book covers and advertising images. Rodchenko was responsible for the poster for Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), theatre set and costume designs, fabric designs and agitprop posters - for the Society for the Struggle Against Illiteracy, for the Centrifuge Co-operative, for the trade unions as "a defender of female labour". Their red and black colour schemes, sweeping typography and bold photocollage had an undeniable chic that would later reappear, without the ideology, in '80s style magazines such as The Face.

Popova and Rodchenko were not innocents though. Popova died in 1924 before the true horrors of the Soviet experiment were apparent. Rodchenko, however, lived through Stalinism but kept the faith. In 1933 and out of official favour, he took a series of propaganda photographs extolling the digging of the White Sea Canal. It was perhaps Stalin's first gulag and 200,000 political prisoners died in its construction. Proof enough, although Rodchenko never acknowledged it, that clean lines have human consequences.