Representation of Workers in Soviet Art - in-person talk by Christine Lindey

It is not surprising that the subject of workers was important in Soviet art since the new, post-Tsarist Socialist Republic was building the worker state. Workers remained a major theme throughout the Soviet era but styles and interpretations of this subject changed over time and place.

The western stereotype which still persists is based on partial truths. There were indeed many idealised depictions of workers. Rosy-cheeked peasants tending over-abundant crops or industrial workers sporting spotless outfits in shiny factories, all seemingly ecstatically dedicated to repetitive, boring or arduous tasks.

Yet In the 1920s works such as Vladimir Lebedev’s Constructivist poster Work With Your Rifle Beside You,1921 which depicted workers in pared down abstracted shapes, conveyed the notion of their social progress through inventive formal means. While paintings such as Alexander Deineka’s Textile Workshops,1926 represented individual women workers in an accessible, realist style, while situating them in a modernist evocation of a factory interior. That the textile workers are barefoot was an honest portrayal of the economic hardships of the immediate post-Revolutionary era, yet the workers’ calm demeanour and their pristine factory denotes the optimism of Socialist construction.

In 1932 Socialist Realism was officially adopted for all the arts. A ‘method’ as opposed to a style, it was never stylistically defined, but it aimed to create a new art for the new society by involving artists alongside other workers in the development of socialism. Rather than elitist aesthetes, the artist’s public would now be peasants and workers. Since realist, positive portrayals of daily life was at Socialist Realism’s heart, this necessarily entailed numerous representations of working life, since this characterises the majority of lives.

Public art such as murals and monumental sculptures featured large as a means of direct access to the people and of embellishing their environment. Vera Mukhina’s 24-meter-tall The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman,1937 exemplifies Socialist Realism at its best by embodying the energy of the young industrial and rural workers’ commitment to building a more egalitarian society.

Artists were encouraged and financially supported to go into the countryside and into industrial sites to witness and record the lived experiences of workers. Many artists such as Izaat Klychev created portraits of named individual workers, a genre hitherto largely reserved for commissioned portraits of the ruling class.

Yet there were some depictions of workers as heroic. Victor Yefimovich Popkov’s The Builders of Bratsk,1960-61 portrays five workers aligned as if posing for a photograph. Seen from below they confront us with determined gaze and solid stance, neither cowed nor stereotyped they are portrayed as individual human beings. Nikolay Ivanovich Andronov’s Raftsmen of the same year depends on Cubism’s angular forms and multiple viewpoints merged with Expressionism’s brilliant, pure colours. Yet the figures’ uncompromising postures brook no argument. Proud of their social importance as workers they leave no doubt that without their work we cannot cross the river on whose banks they stand.

A huge range of jobs, crafts and trades were depicted. Lacemakers, miners, fisherfolk, cooks, soldiers, cotton pickers, tractor drivers, and spinners; a labourer shoulders a pick axe, a formidable woman wields a red hot steel bar. All good reasons for artists to honour their contributions to the new Socialist society.

Just as outstanding Western artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Faith Ringold shine out from the plethora of mostly forgotten mediocre ones, so fine Soviet Socialist Realists such as Mukhina and Andronov shine out from a multitude of mediocre ones.

Christine Lindey was formerly an Associate Lecturer in art history at the University of the Arts, London and at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Her most influential book so far Art in the Cold War: from Vladivostok to Kalamazoo (1990) Herbert Press, London, pioneered the comparative study of Soviet and Western art. Her fifth book - Art for All: British Socially Committed Art c.1939-c.1962, (2018), Artery Publications, London, is the first on this topic.

She contributes visual arts articles and exhibition reviews to the Morning Star and to the SCRSS Digest, the journal of the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies.