Architectural Treasures of Moscow: The Worker and Collective Farm Woman

“The Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was created by Vera Mukhina for the U.S.S.R. pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair held in Paris. The pavilion was designed by Boris Iofan.

The model for the figure of the woman was an 18-year-old telephone operator named Anna Bogoyavlenskaya. The man was sculpted from several models: his face was modeled after Sergei Kasner, a metro worker; his torso was based on that of ballet dancer Igor Basenko; and other parts of his body came from ironworker Nikolai Vasilievich. In Mukhina’s first design the figures were nude, but Ivan Mezhlauk, the commissar of the U.S.S.R. pavilion, convinced Mukhina to put some clothes on them.

To understand how the sculpture would be illuminated by natural light in Paris, they put a model of it in the Moscow Planetarium and simulated the position of the sun in the French capital from May to October — the duration of the expo.

The sculpture was forged from sheets of stainless steel, which were then welded using a unique technology. The height of the composition (to the tip of the sickle) is 23.5 meters (78 feet), and it weighed 80 tons. After the sculpture was put together, it was cut into pieces and sent to Paris in 28 train cars. It took 11 days to put it back together in Paris.

Mukhina convinced Iofan to raise the height of the U.S.S.R. pavilion by one meter to 34 meters (111.5 feet) so that the sculpture would be shown to its best advantage. Construction on the pavilion began in December 1936, and the sculpture was installed on the roof on May 1, 1937. The pavilion stood on the Seine. It was 150 meters (492 feet) long and had five exhibition halls, a 400-seat movie theater, a café and a space for music. The World’s Fair was visited by 30 million people, of which a record 20 million visited the Soviet pavilion.

The German pavilion was directly across from the Soviet pavilion. After the architect Albert Speer saw a model of the U.S.S.R. pavilion, he quickly changed his design. “The sculptural group rose up triumphantly on a plinth over the German pavilion. I quickly did a new sketch of our pavilion, making it a massive cube that would break to pieces any enemy advance, and from its perch on my tower, an eagle with a swastika in its claws looked down on the Russian pair.” Both pavilions were awarded grand prizes at the Fair.

The French artist Jean Effel responded to the melodrama between the Soviet and German pavilions with a cartoon entitled “We’re Tired.” But despite this background tension, Parisians fell in love with the monument, and the mayor of the French capital suggested buying it from the U.S.S.R. But the Soviet government decided to bring Mukhina’s work home.

Some art historians believe that the right hand of the worker held out behind him is an homage to Étienne Falconet’s famous “Bronze Horseman,” the monument to Peter the Great in St. Petersburg. “The Worker and Collective Farm Woman” became the symbol of the film studio Mosfilm in 1948. “The Bronze Horseman” was adopted as the symbol of Lenfilm in 1966.

When the sculpture was returned to the USSR, the question was: Where should it go? Many options were discussed, including putting it atop the dam of the Rybinsk Hydroelectric Power Station. Mukhina dreamed of it on top of the Lenin Hills in Moscow. In the end, the Communist Party decided to put it at the entrance to the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (the precursor to VDNKh). But they only provided enough funds for a ten-meter pedestal. Mukhina called it a “stoop.”

The monument only took its rightful place in architectural history in 2009 when Mukhina’s restored sculpture was put on a new pedestal of exactly 34.5 meters. As Iofan had envisioned, the new pedestal was an exhibition space, although it was almost half the size the original in Paris.

The contemporary bronze bas relief of “Friendship of the Peoples of the 11 Union Republics” is a replica of the one that graced the original U.S.S.R. pavilion in Paris.

Information in the captions came, in part, from “Pavilions and Structures of VDNKh. Worker and Collective Farm Woman” (Moscow, 2020).