This week I visited Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (Рабо́чий и колхо́зница) in Moscow, a monument with an intriguing backstory from the years leading up to World War II.
The 1937 International Exposition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life (Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne) took place in Paris May 25 to November 25 and featured entries from all the world powers of the time. Like the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Paris Expo was first and foremost an ideological competition between communism and fascism. The pavilions for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were built face-to-face with one another, a deliberately provocative design choice.
Architect Boris Mihailovich Iofan designed the Soviet pavilion, but it was scupltor Vera Ignatyevna Mukhina who masterminded the iconic figures atop; a worker and Kolkhoz (collective farm) woman stepping forward and holding aloft the hammer and sickle, representing solidarity between the urban and peasant classes of Soviet people.
Adolf Hitler considered boycotting the Paris expo, but his architect Albert Speer convinced him to participate. Speer had secretly gotten his hands on early blueprints for the Soviet pavilion, inspiring a design of his own. Speer’s pavilion would represent Aryan racial pride and portray Germany as a defender of Europe against the communist untermensch. As an idea, nazism was largely defined as opposition to another idea, so it was appropriate for their signature monument to be conceived in the same fashion.
There’s no more Nazi pavilion. But Worker and Kolkhoz Woman can still be viewed at their permanent home outside the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy in Moscow.
Story Image Credit: Reading Junkie
Ian Kummer
Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty
All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
Two other p[hotos from the CulturedArm we much more impressive stand-off 🙂
Interestingly, that Nazi monument was designed as critical journalism. Winning the moment, but having no future and having, actually, no any sense without the counterpart. And it perished, it never was to continue.
Soviet monument was representing a self-sufficient idea, that had value with or without the nazi oppjnent – and it remans today.
I frankly, never looked at them side to side, to me the Worker And Farmer were always a self-sufficient soviet symbol that does not require Paris expo. That it happenned a fleeting random moment in its life.
In a sense, Nazi were leeching their hype from USSR. Their monument, back there in Paris, was a great point, then and there it was clear and bright. But remove the soviet “thrust” – and Nazi monument is just a cube of stone having zero aesthetic or symbolic value. It is like many rap-artists “remaking” well known music hits of past ages, “rethinking” or “modernizing” or i’d say preying from their corpses because unable to create their own music.