LEF ("ЛЕФ") was the journal of the Left Front of the Arts ("Левый фронт искусств" – "Levy Front Iskusstv"), a widely ranging association of avant-garde writers, photographers, critics and designers in the Soviet Union. It had two runs, one from 1923 to 1925 as LEF, and later from 1927 to 1929 as Novy LEF ('New LEF'). The journal's objective, as set out in one of its first issues, was to "re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art's value for developing communism."

Although LEF was catholic in its choices of writers, it broadly reflected the concerns of the Productivist left-wing of Constructivism. The editors were Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky: fittingly, one a Russian Formalist critic and one a poet and designer who helped compose the 1912 manifesto of Russian Futurists entitled, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste". The covers were designed by Alexander Rodchenko, and featured photomontages early on, being followed by photographs in New LEF. Varvara Stepanova also designed covers.

Among the writings published in LEF for the first time were Mayakovsky's long poem About This, and Sergei Eisenstein's The Montage of Attractions, as well as more political and journalistic works like Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry. The journal had funding from the state, and was discussed critically, but not unsympathetically by Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution (1924).

The later New LEF ("Новый ЛЕФ" – "Novy Lef"), which was edited by Mayakovsky along with the playwright, screenplay writer and photographer Sergei Tretyakov, tried to popularise the idea of 'factography': the idea that new technologies such as photography and film should be utilised by the working class for the production of 'factographic' works. In this it had a great deal of influence on theorists in the West, especially Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. Linked journals also appeared such as the Constructivist architectural journal SA (edited by Moisei Ginzburg and Alexander Vesnin) and Proletarskoe Foto, on photography. The New LEF closed in 1929 over a dispute over its direction between Mayakovsky and Tretyakov, and under pressure for its 'Formalism', which jarred with the incipient Socialist Realism.^{[citation needed]}

After Vladimir Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924, LEF’s first issue of the year dedicated its critical section to the Soviet leader (though the publication’s artistic prose and poetry were not Lenin-themed). These critical articles mainly focused on an analysis of Lenin’s writing and his oratory: this is because the Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky independently organized the project and presented it to LEF. Vladimir Mayakovsky did, however, contribute an unsigned editorial to the issue, in which he criticized the newly-forming habit of Soviet authorities to “canonize” Lenin by mass-producing commercial objects with his portrait or likeness on them. The editorial argued that this practice would undermine Lenin's significance for future generations. In Mayakovsky's words, “Don’t take away his living gait and human traits, which he was able to preserve as he guided history. Lenin is still our contemporary. He is among the living. We need him alive, not dead.” [CVS 148] The other articles do not explicitly develop this point, although they do focus on certain unusual, “human” particularities of Lenin's style.

In total, six writers contributed articles to the critical section of the issue. Their names and the titles of their works follow:

All of these men either belonged to one of two Formalist collectives, OPOJAZ (The Society For the Study of Poetic Language) and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, or were associated with them. Accordingly, their contributions to this issue of LEF focus on Lenin's specific rhetorical techniques, and not on his broader historical or social importance, which is only alluded to in passing in the articles. Since these authors share certain theoretical assumptions about language and rhetoric, moreover, the articles often overlap in the specific topics of their investigations, and produce a stable group of core conclusions about Lenin's style.

Defamiliarization: Defamiliarization, which can broadly be defined as the idea that the power of a work of art depends on how effectively it defies norms and subverts audiences’ expectations, is one of the most important and long-standing ideas in Formalist theory. It emerges as early as 1916, in Viktor Shklovsky's manifesto “Art as Device.” It is therefore unsurprising that several of the articles explain Lenin's ability to communicate ideas effectively, an end he achieved through successfully “defamiliarizing,” or disrupting, stale, established revolutionary language. As Shklovsky writes, “His style consists in downplaying the revolutionary phrase, in replacing its traditional words with workaday synonyms.” Tynyanov also pays attention to this aspect of Lenin's style, arguing that Lenin was always intently focused on whether or not the words that he was using at a given moment were “in sync” with the material realities that they were meant to describe, and that this attention to specificity was more important for Lenin than pretty-sounding turns of phrase.