Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

A man and a woman in stainless steel stride forward, raising a hammer and a sickle so that together they form the Soviet emblem: Worker and Kolkhoz Woman is the defining image of Soviet socialist realism, rendered with an Art Deco sense of movement. The idea and composition came from the architect Boris Iofan, who designed the Soviet pavilion for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris and wanted it crowned by a sculptural group; Vera Mukhina gave the figures their form. In Paris the Soviet and German pavilions were placed face to face across the main boulevard by the Trocadéro, and the pair, striding from west to east along the pavilion's axis, carried a message no visitor missed. Mukhina drew on classical and French models, including the Tyrannicides, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Rude's Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe.

The engineering was novel. Professor Pyotr Lvov proposed chrome-nickel stainless steel rather than bronze because it would catch the light, and the 0.5 mm skin was joined to its internal frame by spot welding instead of rivets. The group was assembled in the yard of a Moscow factory in a few months over a harsh winter, cut into 65 pieces for the train to Paris and reassembled there. The billowing scarf that seems to float behind the figures needed its own supporting truss. Mukhina received one of the first Stalin Prizes for it in 1941, and from 1947 the sculpture became the emblem of the Mosfilm studio, seen at the start of its films.

Brought back to Moscow, the group was put on a low 10-metre plinth by the northern entrance of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, now VDNKh, and suffered decades of corrosion. It was taken down in 2003, and after a restoration that stretched to six years it returned in December 2009 on a new 34.5-metre pavilion that follows Iofan's Paris design, bringing the total height to about 60 metres. The pavilion houses a museum and exhibition centre, opened in 2010, which tells the story of the monument and of Mukhina's work.

Getting there

The sculpture stands near VDNKh's northern entrance in north-eastern Moscow, in the Rostokino area about 1.4 km away. Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO) is about 22 km to the north-west.