The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman: An Impressive Soviet Statue

The colossal sculpture “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” is a benchmark of communist realism and an emblem of the Soviet period. The 197-foot (60 m) tall sculpture depicts a male and female figure holding a sickle and a hammer above their heads as they face forward. Boris Iofan, the architect, came up with the overall plan and arrangement of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman monument, while Vera Mukhina crafted the actual statue in a plastic version.

The monument was built in Moscow for the USSR exhibit at the 1937 International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris, disassembled into 65 pieces for transit, and then rebuilt in France. Because of the stainless chrome-nickel steel used in the statue and the 0.5-millimeter-thick slabs used to cover the interior frame, the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman memorial weighed in at over 63 tons.

After the exhibition ended, the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (Rabóchiy i Kolkhóznitsa) was shipped to Moscow, where it stood on a 33 feet (10 m) pavilion at the exhibition’s northern entryway. Ironically enough, the sculpture stood on a 111 feet (34 m) tall pavilion when it was housed in Paris.

The frame and covering had to be substantially modified from the initial project as a result of negligent disassembly and transit. The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman sculpture suffered substantial corrosion and environmental damage from 1938 until 2003, during which time it was barely repaired.

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Iofan’s initial pedestal design for the Paris exhibition was replicated, and the sculpture was repaired and mounted on it between 2003 and 2009. At the socle or base of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman is where you’ll also find the Vera Mukhina Museum.

After the restoration was done, the statue alone stood at 80 ft (24.5 m), the pavilion at 113 ft (34.5 m), and the overall weight of the monument was 185 tons. This was a more than twofold increase over the initial weight.

The Development of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman Project

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman was meant to be part of the décor for the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 World Expo in Paris. Following an all-union building challenge, the finalist plans for the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman were created by six separate teams, and among them was Boris Iofan’s team which included M. V. Adrianov, A. I. Baranovsky, S. A. Gelfeld, Y. P. Zinkevich, Dmitri Iofan, Y. F. Popov and V. B. Polyatsky.

The committee found that the pavilions in the designs by Shchusev and Alabyan-Chechulin (other finalists) were not detailed enough, while the pavilions in the designs by Ginzburg and Melnikov (another finalist) were too novel. Shchuko-Gelfreich (one of the finalist groups) and Boris Iofan’s proposals were the most workable and philosophically sound.

In the end, the judges favored Iofan’s project because it was the most sparsely decorated and had “a touch of advertising” (something that often sets apart Western country pavilions).

…Very soon an image was born … of a young man and a girl, embodying the masters of the Soviet land—the working class and the collective farm peasantry. They are raising high the emblem of the Soviet country, the hammer, and sickle”.

Boris Iofan

Together with the new pavilion (113 ft; 34.5 m), the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman statue (80 ft; 24.5 m) was to reach a total height of 197 ft or 60 m.

The Inspirations Behind the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman Statue

An ancient monument of Harmodius and Aristogeiton from 477/476 BC served as the inspiration for Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. This is according to the recollections of Boris Iofan’s assistant, who worked with the architect for forty years.

Kritios and Nesiotes, two ancient Greek artists, created statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton standing shoulder to shoulder, blades aloft. Iofan stated that the 1917 October Revolution triumph was the result of a coordinated effort by farmers and factory employees. As a result, he envisioned a two-figure composition for the monument.

The second statue from which Boris Iofan took inspiration for the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman was the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Greek sculpture from the Hellenistic era, dating to the early 2nd century BC. The architect explained this inspiration as the embodiment of the winged victory of 1917.

In a second competition, five artists, including Vyacheslav Andreev, Boris Korolev, Matvey Manizer, Vera Mukhina, and Ivan Shadr, competed to make the final versions of Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. The committee, led by Vyacheslav Molotov (former Premier of the Soviet Union), spent a lot of time studying Mukhina’s design, the future sculptor of the statue.

The People’s Commissariat said that the communal farmer had unsightly “bags” under her eyes and ordered that they be taken away. He also requested that the hammer held by the worker in his left hand be emphasized more prominently.

The man and woman depicted in the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman were initially depicted without clothing to reflect the old Greek style, but the commission requested that this be changed. An ornamental cloth stretched over their bodies and served as the composition’s unifying element, linking the sculpture to the pavilion.

One of the designers of the Soviet pavilion at the Paris show, Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, later recalled a conversation between the Commissariat and Vera Mukhina:

Why the scarf? This is not a dancer, not a skater!
…Mukhina calmly replied:

It is necessary for balance.
She meant, of course, plastic, figurative balance, and the horizontals she so badly needed. But the chairman, not very sophisticated in art, understood her “balance” in a purely physical sense and said:

Well, if it is technically necessary, then another matter…

“Worker And Collective Farmer” by N.V. Voronov, 1990. page 156.

On November 11, 1936, Vera Mukhina’s new plan was given the go-ahead to be put into action.

Meaning and Artistic Value of the Monument

Along with “The Motherland Calls” and the “Soviet War Memorial,” the memorial to the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman is often cited as one of the most important Soviet colossuses that best captured the movement of the 20th century.

Mukhina referred to her Worker and Kolkhoz Woman as “an unstoppable impulse,” and she frequently stressed the contrast between her vision of the sculpture and Boris Iofan’s:

When I received the design for the pavilion, I felt at once that the group must express, above all, not the solemn nature of the figures but the dynamics of our era, the creative impulse that I see everywhere in our country and that is so dear to me. … we must transmit the ideals of our worldview, the image of a man of free thought and free labor; we must convey all the romanticism and creative fervor of our days.

By Vera Mukhina, in the 1938 issue of The Architects’ Journal.

According to the art historians of the Kommersant newspaper of 1989:

“The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” is a continuation of the pictorial tradition associated with the cult of democratic statehood, which emerged in the forms of neoclassicism in France after the revolution (in “Oath of the Horatii,” Jacques Louis David repeats the poses of the same “tyrant-fighters”). Perhaps the most striking expression of this cult is the Statue of Liberty on the ocean gate [New York Harbor] in the United States, made again by the Frenchman Auguste Bartholdi. Vera Mukhina, for her part, studied under the Frenchman Antoine Bourdelle, Rodin’s assistant and author of numerous allegorical monuments to the glory of the Republic.

Like the Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great and the Monument to Minin and Pozharsky, where a symbolic gesture also referred to the destiny of Russia, the open broad palm of the male worker’s hand in the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman statue represented the power of the working people over the state.

The collective farmer (Kolkhoz) woman in the statue is the embodiment of the 1930s female stereotype: short hair, a muscular build, and no scarf over her head. She is not dressed in working clothes; rather, she wears urban sundresses like the sculpture Mukhina did at the time.

The statue reflects the sexism of collectivization-era visual propaganda, in which a communal farmer’s wife was meant to symbolize the period’s powerful and fruitful inception.

Who Are the Persons in the Sculpture?

18-year-old Anna Ivanovna Bogoyavlenskaya, whom sculptors Nikolai Andreev and Vera Mukhina encountered by chance while strolling through a park, served as the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’s female model. The girl, who at the time was a telephonist for the NKVD, was the reflection of a model sportswoman, a Komsomol girl, and attractiveness.

The models used for the male figure of the sculpture included former ballet dancer Igor Basenko for the body and metro builder Sergey Kasner for the visage, both of whom Mukhina scouted at the Athletes Parade, a health and fitness exhibition.

One unorthodox approach the artist took was to leave the figures’ lips slightly open, giving the impression that they were chanting or screaming. The scarf, the hands, and the creases in the clothing all added horizontality, which helped to temper the verticality of the pavilion’s design.

The technical and economic achievements of the early twentieth century were reflected in the sculpture as well. In 1937, the hammer and sickle held by the sculpture’s protagonists were mainly understood to be symbols of free and tranquil work.

Mukhina stressed that the purpose of the plastic used in the monument was to convey the concept and atmosphere of the arrangement, rather than the things the figurines were holding.

Production and Setting Up of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

The monument’s primary frame was fabricated at the Stalmost factory in Moscow, while the exterior casing was finished at a prototype plant of a research institute on machines and metalworking led by Professor Pyotr Nikolayevich Lvov. He proposed using stainless chrome-nickel steel for the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, despite early misgivings from Mukhina and the rest of the crew.

Since the memorial needed to be brighter than the eagle on the German pavilion and the Eiffel Tower on the French pavilion, the fact that steel reflects light better than metal and copper was the deciding factor. Contact spot welding, developed by Lvov in the 1930s, has been widely adopted for aircraft coatings ever since.

In order to successfully put together the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, this technology was chosen over the more commonplace technique of connecting bolts at the time.

Four gypsum models, the largest of which measured 95 cm, were available to the crew before they began their work. There were a total of 160 people employed during construction.

The process took place in the plant’s atrium over the course of three shifts and required the use of a crane measuring 115 ft (35 m) in height and equipped with a 49 ft (15 m) pole.

The craftsmen used 5.9 inches (15 cm) of thick planks and wooden molds to create the cladding’s intricate features. The plastic components of the memorial were chiseled out from within. Project members reflected on:

It was especially difficult to work in February, when in the freezing cold one could only escape the wind inside the frame, under Kolkhoznitsa’s [the female figure’s] skirt. We warmed ourselves in the tent with a fire built in a cauldron that had been dug into the ground. The sheets of the shell were welded by hand…

The Russian World Almanac: The Space and Time of Russian Culture, page 64.

The sculpture’s hands and skulls needed a different approach than the rest of the piece; they could not be hammered out using wooden molds. So, they came up with a different plan: They filled broken hardwood head blanks with clay, then removed the clay’s top layer and immersed the resulting “blanks” in steel.

The creation of the scarf was fraught with challenges, as the 98-foot (30 m) long “cloth” required being carried horizontally without any external support and weighed around five tons.

In the midst of Mukhina’s creation of this work, the factory’s head publicly criticized her, saying that her invention of a scarf could potentially damage the sculpture in high winds and that she was constantly delaying deadlines because of these changes.

In fact, the factory head claimed that, from certain perspectives, the “enemy of the people,” Leon Trotsky, could be seen in the statue.

Engineers ignored the criticism and created a framework for the scarf so that it could drift easily behind the backs of the worker and the collective farmer.

A 63-ton frame was built to hold up the sculpture of the time. Due to the use of 0.5-millimeter-thick steel slabs, the exterior casings only weighed 12 tons. The fabrication of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman took approximately 3.5 months.

After the construction was complete, a government committee led by the People’s Commissar (Minister) for Defense, Kliment Voroshilov, toured the factory, and that same day, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin inspected the completed memorial. After that, disassembly started in earnest so that the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman could be shipped to Paris.

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman in the 1937 Paris International Exposition

The memorial was disassembled into 65 parts and put into boxes wrapped with felt before being transported. The number of materials necessitated the use of 28 train wagons to carry them. The train went all over Europe, and the chief engineer had to use a thermal lance to chop off pieces of the tracks so the cars could get through a passage in Poland.

Boris Iofan encountered the train carrying the sculpture’s components in Paris. When the 541-foot (165 m) long pavilion of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman was constructed in 11 days instead of the estimated 24 days, the installation work was finished in record time.

Because of its low cost and lack of cold and weather resistance, Gazgan marble was selected as the exterior material of the pavilion. Iofan intended for the pavilion’s exterior to be colorful with a gradual transition from dark brown to gray, and the final material was to be hardy granite. The upper sculpture was installed without considering atmospheric forces:

Pyotr Nikolayevich Lvov … was a genius designer, but he was an aviation designer… And he made it in the image and likeness of aircraft construction. Here, the man’s arm was frameless. … Like an airplane fuselage. And it was stapled like… …a flange attached to the man’s torso and a flange attached to the arm. And this was all attached to the stainless shell.

Vadim Tserkovnikov, the project leader from 2003–2009 for restoring the “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman”.

For the assembly, specialists brought a unique tower crane from Moscow, with its primary shaft supported by steel wire cables. Workers found that one of the cables had been sanded down and threatened to collapse on the statue and irreparably damage it just days before the Paris show began. They were able to quickly repair the wire and perform assembly, and additional security officers were now stationed nearby overnight for peace of mind.

On May 25, 1937, the show opened to the public. The French press called the “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” the greatest piece of the 20th century and the epitome of the concept of “liberated labor,” and the Soviet Union exhibit was praised for its success.

French poet Louis Aragon, dramatist Romain Rolland, artists Frans Masereel and Pablo Picasso, and many others praised Mukhina’s work, calling it a “striking, modern creation, a dynamic embodiment of the future.”

Various countries released sets of collectible stamps, medals, postcards, and banners featuring the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. Despite Mukhina’s repeated claims that the extremely short timeline prevented her from being fully pleased with the work, reviewers unanimously praised the sculpture for its emotion.

After being charged as enemies of the Soviet system, Exhibition Commissariat Ivan Mezhlauk and nearly all of the members of the working group responsible for the construction of the pavilion and the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman sculpture were executed.

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’s Return to Moscow

The Soviet government got an offer to sell the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman to France after the Paris exposition ended, and a fund was established to help pay for its purchase. But ultimately, it was agreed to send it back to the Soviet Union.

Due to Mukhina’s refusal to reside with a government team in Paris, she was barred from carrying out the disassembly and instead forced to stay at the home of “non-returnee” (a socialist term for emigrants) Aleksandra Ekster.

Those who were tasked with removing the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman were not engaged in its assemblage or creation, so they were unaware of the frame’s intricacies.

The experts call the procedure “barbaric” because the memorial had to be sliced into 44 pieces using a thermal lance and put onto open platforms; as a result, all but the male figure’s head and one arm were damaged during transport to Moscow.

The sculpture was dismantled and reassembled in Moscow between January and August of 1939. The exterior of the statue was now made sturdier with 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) of steel slabs. There were significant changes made from the initial version. In the end, there was a need to alter the statue’s framework by more than 50 percent.

Mukhina proposed Leninskiye Gory (the Sparrow Hills today) or Krymsky Val Street as the best possible location for the reinstallation, which sparked heated debate. She tried writing the government several times with a reasonable request, but her messages had no effect.

The statue was originally planned to be placed on the center pier of the lower end of the lock (water navigation) at the soon-to-be-built Rybinsk Hydroelectric Station. Even a blueprint for the project was published in the newspaper.

Manezhnaya Square was suggested as a substitute location because the hydropower plant was still under construction at the time. The final location ended up being in front of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV). Meanwhile, in 1953, the “Mother Volga” statue was erected at the hydroelectric station.

When the Monument Fell Out of Favor

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman statue was rushed into place on a 33-foot (10 m) tall plinth for the inauguration of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. Vera Mukhina criticized it as a “stump” that kills the momentum of the piece.

I can only throw up my hands helplessly because all my protests to resolve this issue have led to nothing. None of the architects raised a protest over the completely unacceptable staging of this statue, a production that destroyed the entire impulse of sculpture.

Researchers refer to this time in the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’s history as the “degeneration of the symbol.” Because the sculpture’s emotive upward ambition was lost when it was placed on a low-height pedestal. This time period also coincides with the revival of the political system. As an emblem of authoritarian brutality and equality, the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman became targets of criticism.

For decades, Mukhina and Iofan tried to get the memorial relocated or put on a pedestal that better matched the initial plan. In 1975, the Moscow City Duma agreed to build Boris Iofan’s raised pavilion on which the sculpture would be displayed. However, the architect passed away in 1976, leaving the project unfinished.

The prospect of relocating the memorial was brought up again on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. One suggestion called for affixing it to the directional sign outside the Central House of Artists on Krymsky Val. The monument’s deteriorating state, however, meant that these plans were never put into action.

Corrosion had eaten away at the supporting framework, and a full frame replacement would have been necessary to move the statue. In 1997, the painter Zurab Tsereteli placed a memorial honoring Peter the Great at the same location, which is located near the Central House of Artists.

In 1998, it was determined that the situation for the Central House of Artists was dire. A collection of artists made a protest to raise awareness of the issue. By dressing up the statue in a red sundress, a blue jumpsuit, and a scarf in the colors of the Russian flag, they staged an unusual event. They then performed a rally and concert at the base of the monument.

Three days after permission was given for the event, the clothing was taken from the monument, and the deputy director responsible for the permit was abruptly fired. Because the permit was determined to contain no illegal content either. The official justification for removing the clothing was that the greater “windage” put too much strain on the framework.

Restoration of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

In 2003, it was decided to repair the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, and by 2005, everything was expected to be back to normal. The city of Moscow set aside 35 million rubles for the dismantling, but just the scaffolding alone cost $5 million (roughly 140 million rubles).

Following the completion of the dismantling phase, the project was halted due to suspicions of theft; work did not restart until 2007, following numerous examinations.

The Moscow government declared a new repair competition on December 31, 2008, with a maximum contract amount of 2.395 billion rubles. One company was the sole candidate and ultimately the successful tenderer on December 31.

The company was a subsidiary of a construction company called “Inteco” owned by Elena Baturina, the wife of Moscow’s former mayor Yuri Luzhkov. It contributed a higher amount of 2.905 billion rubles (over $100 million) for the statue. The repairs weren’t finished until November 2009.

Sculptor Vadim Tserkovnikov oversaw the restoration’s conception and execution. Once the materials were manufactured by a research institute, the casting and assembly took place at the Belgorod factory “Energomash”. Due to the lack of initial paperwork and the various characteristics of new-generation materials, experts revised the computations and design of the frame. The team created special coverings and materials.

The sculpture was broken down into 40 individual pieces, photographed, and then analyzed by a machine for corrosion damage using spectrum imaging. Only 10% of the parts needed to be changed entirely; the remainder could be restored.

Simultaneously, they X-rayed over a million welds. Pigeons were able to make a home in the sculpture’s damp interior because of design defects that allowed air to leak in.

Cleaning was the second step in the reconstruction process. Exhaust gases, condensed precipitation, and avian droppings had accumulated for nearly 70 years, taking the form of stalactites in the regions of the scarf and skirt.

A non-governmental organization created a highly poisonous and pourable substance to disintegrate them. At a global showcase in Brussels, this substance was recognized with an award.

The product’s special makeup made it possible to apply it at any angle; it also prevented flow, improved adherence, and made it more than twice as resistant to damaging weather factors. In order to handle all of the sculpture’s finer features, a ton of plaster was needed. It was then coated with a second layer of insulating material.

Tserkovnikov directed the calculation and construction of a novel triple frame, which consisted of the shell’s sustaining frame, an intermediary frame, and a structural frame that linked the two. Due to the incorporation of the storm wind force into the new design, the weight of the pavilion rose by a factor of 2.5 following the reconstruction.

200 tons were the total weight of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. The sculpture sat atop a pavilion whose design was largely based on Iofana’s 1937 blueprint. The pavilion reached 216 feet (66 m) in length and featured a coat of arms that was originally designed for the 1937 Paris Exposition and had been carefully conserved.

On November 28, 2009, the assembly of the statue was completed using one of only three custom-built cranes in the globe, imported from Finland. On December 4, 2009, the monument opened to the public for the first time.

The removal, relocation, and refurbishment of the monument totaled 2.9 billion rubles ($100 million). Experts agreed that this figure was at least twice as high as it should be.

Vadim Tserkovnikov explained that the cost of restorating the statue itself was much lower than the cost of its “attributes,” such as the need to construct a pedestal 196 feet (60 m) in height and import a crane from Finland, which together cost several tens of millions of rubles.

Ownership Disputes Over the Statue

Tobacco manufacturer “Yava” paid Vera Mukhina’s son, Vsevolod Zamkov, in 1999 for the right to use the image of his mother’s “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” in a marketing campaign.

Then, a law firm in Moscow offered to represent Zamkov in trademark infringement cases against several businesses, including Mosfilm Studio, Monolit clothing factory, a distillery, and others, for their use of the images of Worker and Kolkhoz Woman.

The money would be put into a fund for the sculpture’s repair. The court threw out the case because the heir’s claims were unfounded and Mukhina had legally transferred the rights to using the image of her statue.

In fact, on November 20, 1975, and August 28, 1989, respectively, the State Patent Bureau had granted trademarks that would later end on October 10, 2005, and April 5, 2009.

When the “Just Russia” socialist party tried to sue the communist CPRF party in 2007 for copyright infringement and using Mukhina’s work in propagandist materials, they were thrown out of court by the Supreme Court of Russia.

In 2009, the sculpture’s ownership was still up in the air.

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman Museum

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman Museum, which showcases the monument’s past through photos, models, and other artifacts, debuted in the base building on September 4, 2010. The total exhibition area was around 34,450 km2 (3,200 m2), and it was split between three floors.

After its reconstruction, the “Rabóchiy i Kolkhóznitsa” pavilion was first given to the museum organization, and then in 2017, it was added to the VDNKh’s collection. The pavilion was disassembled so that it could be “rethought” for the upcoming VDNKh museum.

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman in Culture

The screensaver for Grigory Alexandrov’s 1947 film Springtime was a photograph of The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. In 1948, the sculpture was adopted as the studio’s formal emblem. The plaster copy for the photograph was created by Vera Mukhina in November 1950 under a unique arrangement with the director. The statue became the property of the studio.

In 1951, Mukhina was paid 20,000 rubles for her work on the plaster model of The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, and another 7,500 rubles for the transfer of rights to use her image in the film’s screensaver, as evidenced by papers still in existence from the Mosfilm archives.

The image of “The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” actually appeared in films much earlier than that, such as “The Foundling” (1939), “Tanya” (1940), and the musical “Hello Moscow!” (1945). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the statue appeared in the films “Suicide”, “Burnt by the Sun” and “Day Watch”, as well as the animated movies “Space Dogs” and “Kikoriki.”

In 1938, a stamp featuring the picture of The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman was issued as a Soviet standard postal stamp. After that, many stamp sets, such as the ones issued in 1961, 1976, and 1988, featured images of the memorial.

Stamps depicting The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman were typically the highest sellers. In 1967, the sculpture was featured on Gosbank’s jubilee series of coinage and appeared on an Albanian postage stamp from 1963.

Numerous smaller replicas of the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman statues can be found throughout Russia in places like Bikin and Verkhnyaya Pyshma.

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman at a Glance