Alexander Rodchenko's Russian revolution

It's a bold statement, but one of the curators at the Pushkin Gallery in Moscow is not afraid to say it. "Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova were the first designers," she says. And looking round at the room dedicated to the man and woman who are considered two of Russia's most important avant-garde artists, you know what she means.

Wooden mobiles in circles and squares hang from the ceiling, paintings and photographs line the walls, and furniture and ceramics make up the rest of the space. In the Soviet Union of the 1910s and 1920s, the pair stirred up a maelstrom of creativity, putting themselves at the forefront of the Constructivist movement, which eschewed the idea of art for art's sake. And while history has afforded Rodchenko more fame for his part in this movement than Popova, it is unjustified: both artists were equally revolutionary, dragging their art beyond the picture frame and into the "real" world.

They and their group were responsible for taking art in Soviet Russia out of the galleries and into the world of tables and chairs and buildings, theatre, graphic design, photography and fashion. And to demonstrate the breadth of their capabilities, next month Tate Modern in London will show a major retrospective devoted to the pair's work.

Both artists felt strongly that ideology should form the lifeblood of their work, and nothing shows this more than Rodchenko's design for a Workers' Club, which he exhibited in the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Paris in 1925. Tate Modern will have a reconstruction of the club, direct from his designs. This was design with function that went beyond utilitarianism: it was created to enable leisure, an essential tenet of Lenin's revolutionary ideal. Labourers should use their free time outside of work relaxing – but within a context that was productive, communal, and with design at its centre. As such, there was to be a Lenin Corner of the club with Constructivist magazines and a screen on which could be projected signs. This was typical of the Constructivist movement's approach to art, as they branched out to graphic design, theatre stage sets and posters. This Workers' Club was a theatre of sorts, where each worker would play his part.

Popova, on the other hand, was known for contributing her artistic skills to revolutionary plays such as Earth in Turmoil by Sergei Tretyakov, an important theorist and poet for the Russian avant-garde set. Her slogans and drawings for the play will be on display, as well as the textiles and patterns she created for dress designs. Those patterns and drawings would hang on the factory wall for the seamstresses' reference and inspiration; inspiring not only for the clothes that would eventually be produced, but for the prominence of this female artist who had broken through the boundaries of sexism to hold her own in a male world, a living example of the Bolsheviks' promise of the emancipation of women under socialism.

Popova would only live to the age of 35, dying in 1924; Rodchenko continued working into the 1950s. Their intense artistic collaboration, however, worked to secure radical changes both artistically and ideologically – not only for Soviet Russia but for the evolution of design.

Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism, sponsored by The Independent, is at Tate Modern, from 12 Feb