1. Women at Work:
Artistic production, gender, and politics in Russian art and visual culture
Alise Tifentale, City University of New York, The Graduate Center
As part of my larger research project dealing with women as image makers and images of
women in the twentieth century, I am investigating the relationships between labor and its
representation in art and visual culture in the late Imperial Russia and early Soviet Union. My
research, which focuses on photography but is not limited to it, also raises questions regarding
art historical methodologies and terminology, as very often the standard tools and methods of
western art history and criticism are not directly applicable to art and visual culture produced in
the Soviet Union.
Attempting to map out the major research questions and to define the gaps in the existing
scholarship, I will be addressing a case study of two sculptures by the Russian artist Vera
Mukhina (1889-1953) in their political and cultural context. Being part of a research in progress,
my paper contains more questions than answers, and these questions investigate topics such as
the dichotomy of formalist versus politicized readings of art produced under socialist realism, the
role of women as image-makers with a political agenda, and the impossibility to directly apply
the western feminist critique to Russian and Soviet art made by women artists as well as to art
which directly deals with the construction of Soviet femininity.
Vera Mukhina is most widely known as the artist of the grandiose stainless-steel sculpture
Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937). The sculptural group originally was installed on top
of the Soviet pavilion in the Paris International Exposition of 1937, strategically located opposite
the German pavilion. Later it became one of the ever-present symbols of the Soviet visual culture
when it was used as a logo of the leading Soviet film studio, Mosfilm. The sculpture is recently
reinstalled in Moscow after a lengthy restoration (2003-2009). This sculpture evokes some of the
major theoretical problems typical to the interpretation of early Soviet art from the perspective of
the traditional methodology of western art history.
The specter of socialist realism definitely haunts the discussions about Soviet art, often
limiting the debate with politicized reading of all artistic output and focusing on the oppression
of a free artistic expression. The life and career of Vera Mukhina can be viewed as an exemplary
case in this context. Socialist realism as the official Soviet method of any artistic production after
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2. 1934 theoretically defined itself in terms of difference – as an opposition to the western capitalist
art.i
For instance, artistic production in the early Soviet Union often was perceived as collective
labor, opposite to the western modernist idea of a genius creating great art in the solitude of his
or her studio.
In addition, it is worth noting that such a juxtaposition of Russian difference, or
uniqueness, including the collective artistic production, against the Western European
individualism definitely was not an innovation by the theorists of Socialist Realism.
This acknowledgment and self-definition of the Russian art in terms of difference and
contrast to the western art is associated already with the early Russian avant-garde, and what is
especially relevant to our today’s conversation, another very important role in defining this
difference or alterity was played by the discussions about gender equality and the women’s
emancipation movement which provided the intellectual and political background for the
Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century, one of the earliest avant-gardes where significant
contributors were women artists.
For example, “In 1913 Natalya Goncharova wrote a remarkable manifesto in which she
distinguished Russian art from Western art expressly because of the West’s adherence to archaic
notions of individuality and genius: “I shake off the dust of the West and I consider all those
people ridiculous and backward who still imitate Western models in the hope of becoming pure
painters…Similarly, I find those people ridiculous who advocate individuality and who assume
there is some value in their ‘I’ even when it is extremely limited.” One of her objectives was to
“fight against the debased and decomposing doctrine of individualism, which is now in a period
of agony”.”ii
Thus Isaak argues that the Russian avant-garde artists actually were the precursors
of the later Western feminism (p. 83).iii
Later this idea about a collective artistic production became one of the most important
arguments of the leading avant-garde artists and theorists of the immediate post-revolutionary
years, for the Productivists in particular. At least theoretically it was also part of the official
discourse later, after the proclamation of socialist realism as the official and state-supported
creative program. Soviet art positioned itself against the modernist values such as originality,
individuality, and uniqueness of an artist’s output as well as elitist perception of the audience:
“to (..) art for the few, Soviet artists oppose art for the millions, for the masses, for the people”
(p.9).iv
As Boris Groys has observed, contrary to the modernist dichotomy of high and low
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3. culture, “socialist realism revolved around the opposition between Soviet and non-Soviet. (…)
The notion of Sovietness (…) was understood, first and foremost, in terms of autonomy, with
communism defined as man’s liberation from the forces of nature and the market economy.”v
Then how this principle of collective labor, now liberated from the forces of market
economy, relates to the works by Vera Muhkina? Speaking of art as a collective effort, in the case
of Worker and Collective Farm Woman, the architect Boris Iofan (1891–1976), who designed the
Soviet pavilion for the Paris International Exposition, should be credited for the original idea of
the sculpture. Iofan’s idea, in its turn, very much resembled his own earlier design of the Palace
of the Soviets (1933) which was a visionary and never-realized project for a skyscraper topped
with an enormous sculpture of Lenin. Similar compositional device was employed by Iofan in
another propaganda structure, the Soviet pavilion in the New York’s World Fair of 1939.vi
Mukhina won the competition for the implementation of Iofan's sketch and supervised its
technical realization together with two other women sculptors, Nina Zelenskaya and Zinaida
Ivanova. Mukhina’s proposal was chosen out of several very similar solutions.
In the juxtaposition of the Soviet and German pavilions in the international exhibition of
1937 in Paris, a prelude to World War II was performed in the language of art and architecture:
Vera Mukhina versus Josef Thorak, Socialist Realism versus National Socialist art, sculptures of
Lenin and Stalin versus nude athletes, models of Boris Iofan’s visionary Palace of the Soviets
and Albert Speer’s Nuremberg stadium and the Haus der Kunst in Munich and so on.vii
For our
purposes it is worth noting that Mukhina’s sculpture was a celebration of the theoretical symbol
of the Soviet state – they are the working class heroes, the male urban factory worker and the
female rural collective farm worker representing the alleged gender equality in the Soviet Union.
Moreover, their purposefulness, dynamism, and energy focused on labor whereas Thorak’s
figures of athletes celebrated a body that appears idealized, static, and eternal.
Another aspect of difference: the actual realization of the sculpture was a large-scale
collective effort that had more in common with construction site and large-scale manufacturing
as with the studio artist’s work as we know it. Worker and Collective Farm Woman was rather
manufactured and constructed than sculpted in a traditional manner. Instead of the traditional
methods of sculpting, the additive and subtractive, this monumental object required mechanical
means of production, using modern technologies and materials borrowed from architecture in
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4. order to signal a break from the classical modes of sculpture and venturing into a new and
progressive mode of artistic production.
Worker and Collective Farm Woman was a stainless-steel construction, manufactured, or
rather built in a factory in very close cooperation with engineers and technicians. Application of
new, industrial technologies (spot welding) and nontraditional materials (steel) allowed Mukhina
to realize such expressive features as a woman’s shawl, flying freely in the air (“a horizontal loop
30 metres in diameter, and receding to a distance of 10 metres” behind the two figures).viii
This
element would not be possible in such scale with traditional materials such as bronze or stone.
Thus in theory Worker and Collective Farm Woman served as a literal illustration of a
socialist realism manifesto according to which Soviet art in general, “answering the interests and
demands of the millions of working people, strives for a mass character, for large scale and for
monumental effect” (p. 11).ix
In practice, however, the Worker and Collective Farm Woman can be seen as a
continuation of processes originating in the western art history, and, viewed from this
perspective, if there is something particularly “Soviet” in this sculpture then perhaps it is only the
hammer and sickle, symbols of communism depicting the unity of the working class consisting
of urban and rural workers.
For example, the figural composition itself, apart from the modern materials, appears as
strongly linked to the history of western art, from the classical antiquity to the early 20th century
modernism. For instance, Mukhina has mentioned Nike of Samothrace as one of sources of her
inspiration for this work, and Mukhina was also exposed to French neoclassicism during her stay
in Paris from 1912 to 1914, when she worked in the studio of Antoine Bourdelle.
Furthermore, also the idea of the collective artistic production and sculpture as a
construction does not appear to be so very much different from earlier examples in European art,
such as the collaboration between the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi and engineer
Gustave Eiffel in the making of the Statue of Liberty (finished 1886).
The fact that Worker and Collective Farm Woman was an interpretation of the idea by the
architect Boris Iofan, of course, does not diminish Mukhina’s contribution and her innovative
approach to the architect’s vision. It rather points to the issues related to collective authorship in
the Soviet art that on the one hand clearly contradict the values of the modernism in the western
Europe such as the individual genius, artistic autonomy, and freedom of creative expression. On
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5. the other hand, numerous aspects of the soviet art can be seen as directly continuing or referring
to the history of western European art and to some of the current processes of the early 20th
century.
In addition, it also reminds us that the economic infrastructure in the Soviet Union of this
period was organized around official state commissions and was not subject to the rules of art
market as it was in the capitalist countries. Thus different forces shaped the careers of artists.
Mukhina’s career poses further questions about the relationship between an artist and the
official art establishment of the Stalinist regime. Mukhina was born in a merchant’s family in
Riga, one of the westernmost cities of tsarist Russia. Her upper middle class upbringing included
studying art in Paris and spending summers in a holiday house in Crimea. After the Russian
Revolution of 1917, however, Mukhina had proved her loyalty to the new Soviet state in the first
post-revolutionary years by taking part in “the monumental propaganda” program initiated by
Lenin.x
At the same time, Mukhina was not a member of the communist party and maintained
friendships with “prosecuted artists,” according to Bettina Jungen, one of the few scholars
focusing on Vera Mukhina.xi
Jungen suggests that “Mukhina was never an obsequious state artist,
but her social ideals and artistic forms were instrumentalized by the propaganda of the Soviet
regime.”xii
In addition, Jungen notes “that in [Mukhina’s] view the woman artist suffered
tremendously under unjust art politics.”xiii
Yet it seems that Mukhina had a rather successful career. The artist received numerous
other state-sponsored commissions, including portraits of academicians and Red Army heroes.
Mukhina received prestigious awards, such as several Stalin Prizes, orders, and the honorary title
People’s Artist of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. She lectured in VKHUTEIN (The
Higher Institute of Arts and Technology, a Soviet analogue of Bauhaus in a sense),xiv
and she was
elected a member of the executive council of the Art Academy of the Soviet Union (1947 until
1953). Apart from a brief “fall from grace” (1930-1932), when Mukhina’s family was deported
because of an accusation against her husband (surgeon Sergei Zamkov), she was among the
official, legitimate, state-supported artists of the Soviet establishment.
Then how to interpret the life and career of Vera Mukhina: was she the victim of “unjust
art politics” as a woman artist, or quite the contrary, a successful artist and an example of the
new, liberated and equal soviet woman? Most likely, this question cannot be answered
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6. unambiguously as well as we cannot always find unambiguous interpretations of the images of
women created by Mukhina herself.
For example, Mukhina’s sculpture Peasant Woman (1927) is a commissioned piece for
the exhibition held in Moscow in 1927 in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Russian
Revolution. As an official state commission, it can be viewed as an exemplary case of state
propaganda. Yet at the same time this sculpture can be discussed as a continuation of some of the
ideas of French modernism.
Mukhina herself has mentioned her respect for the work of Aristide Maillol.xv
Bettina
Jungen points to Maillol’s Pomona (1910) in particular. Even though some formal affinities
between Pomona and Peasant Woman are obvious, so are their differences, especially in their
respective methods of gender construction. The grace and nudity of Pomona and other visually
pleasing Maillol sculptures could be seen as corresponding to mostly male viewers’ fantasies of
total possession of a woman’s body, rendered submissive and available for infinite observation.
Mukhina’s Peasant Woman, quite contrarily to Maillol’s Pomona, is neither graceful nor
nude, and absolutely not submissive. Her stance seems independent, active, and thus even
threatening to a male viewer, her crossed hands and exaggerated feet implying a dominating
presence. It seems possible to agree with some Soviet art critics, Mukhina’s contemporaries. For
instance, Petr Suzdalev characterized the Peasant Woman as “promoting a new and idealized
view of the beauty of the Soviet working woman of the 1920s.”xvi
David Arkin openly juxtaposed
Mukhina’s work to that of Maillol, whose Pomona he called “a fanciful blend of early 20th
century Paris and neoclassicism,” victoriously noting that “Peasant Woman was free of all such
stylization or affectation.”xvii
French neoclassicism and archaism definitely influenced Mukhina’s work while she
studied in Paris (1912-1914). xviii
Jungen refers to Mukhina’s teacher Antoine Bourdelle’s
Penelope (1907-1912) and argues that “the subtle vigor of the heavy body and the contemplative
pose express a type of patient stability that can also often be found in Mukhina’s figures.”xix
The
author relies on Penelope Curtis’s generalization “that peasant life [in Soviet Socialist Realism
sculpture] was linked to archaism to produce images of great stoic monumentality.”xx
The confrontational, self-assured, and maybe even ironic image of the Peasant Woman
seems to be rather removed from Bourdelle’s inward-looking, contemplative, and melancholic
Penelope and majority of his female figures.
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7. Peasant Woman succeeds in avoiding a direct reference to the classical canons of female
beauty as expressed in works of Bourdelle, Maillol, and other Western male sculptors. It appears
as an exception in the endless row of nude and draped female figures produced in the classical
guise of Venuses and Aphrodites and the like. Peasant Woman is fully clothed and represents a
contemporary type, a real life woman, a Russian of the 20th century, not a fantasy inspired by the
Greek or Roman myths. Thus it is possible to argue that Mukhina’s sculpture does not replicate
the classical Western ideas of femininity. It rejects softness, melancholy, eroticism or
sensuousness, fragility, weakness, and elegance of the traditional female figure.
Rather it is an image of a certain independence and empowerment of a woman. As
Jungen has put it, “The official view was that Mukhina’s Peasant Woman supported the concerns
of Soviet politics. She was seen as the embodiment of a healthy, strong and proud peasantry that
stood for her country. She also represented the Soviet woman’s new self-confidence and
willingness to give her heart and soul to her land.”xxi
However, this gender equality suggested by these words was present neither in the real
life nor in the art world, the “new Soviet woman” being more a vision than reality.
In real life, the peasant women were the lowest class even in a theoretically classless society, and
the art world, majority of which was masculine, received Mukhina’s image of this strong and
confident woman with ridicule.
In the Soviet Union of the late 1920s a peasant woman could hardly embody a
progressive idea. If women appeared in Soviet political visual communication, then only as
secondary and subordinate to men, and most often as urban factory workers, not peasants.xxii
Thus
Peasant Woman is an exception in the context of Soviet popular imagery of the decade – a rather
heroic female image in time when male role models dominate, and a peasant among factory
workers.
According to sociologist Victoria Bonnell, “the peasant woman presented the most
complex and controversial image in the lexicon of Soviet political art.”xxiii
Scholars have agreed upon the deprived status of rural women in Russia before and also
after the Revolution that had created the baba.xxiv
The baba was a symbol of “the ‘darkest,’ most
backward layer of the Russian population, a dead weight and a potential source of
counterrevolution,”xxv
or, in other words, “the baba was not perceived as the fairer sex, but as the
darker sector of the already dark peasant masses.”xxvi
Lynne Viola adds that the baba is “illiterate,
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8. ignorant (in the broader sense nekul’turnaia [uncivilized]), superstitious, a rumor-monger, and, in
general, given into irrational outbursts of hysteria.”xxvii
Bonnell concludes that baba “signif[ied]
the wretched, brutal, and patriarchal world of the peasant wife, who was subordinated to
husband, priest, and police.xxviii
To make matters more complicated, some art historians remind us that Mukhina was
brought up in a tsarist bourgeois milieu that was replaced, after the Revolution, by its opposite, a
society ruled by the Communist party in the name of proletariat. This dichotomy is especially
relevant to the Peasant Woman. Russian art historian Yelena Vasilyevskaya argues that “in this
commissioned sculpture one can clearly feel a view from another social environment, mixed with
fear and awe. (. . . ) [the sculpture] symbolized self-confident power of a new class allowing for
no compromises. (. . . ) The goddess of abundance that the sculptress tried to represent turned
into a severe and unyielding defender of the fruit of peasants’ labor.” xxix
The work also appears significantly different from most of other sculptures of female
figures produced by the Soviet women artists in the late 1920s and 1930s.
The reception of the sculpture in the art world also points to some of the discrepancies
betweenthe theoretically acclaimed gender equality and the patriarchal and even somewhat
bourgeois outlook that was dominant in the Soviet art world of the 1920s.
Some of the comments made by male contemporaries betray the still patriarchal society
where emancipation and gender equality was just another theoretical construction, not yet
accepted or understood. These comments may sound more ironic or humorous than affirmative.
These remarks deliver a gendered view of the Peasant Woman or comment more generally on
Mukhina as a female artist in a male-dominated field.
For instance, painter and teacher Ilya Mashkov’s comment that “such a woman gives
birth while standing, without uttering a sound”xxx
does not seem to analyze or evaluate the
sculpture itself, it rather expresses male viewer’s reaction to an image of superhuman, almighty
idea of Soviet femininity.
In a review of the exhibition where the Peasant Woman was presented, Leonid Sobinov
writes: “Male art is rather weak in the show, / Where to flee from the female domination?
Mukhina’s baba overcame everybody / By sole might and with no effort.”xxxi
His review,
however, also does not seem to discuss the sculpture’s artistic merit but instead comments on the
obviously unexpected masculinity and strength of the female image.
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9. Definitely there is still much research to be done on the details of Vera Mukhina’s
extraordinary career and the circumstances that put her in the place of the most important Soviet
artist representing the might and power of the Soviet Union in this context. Additional
biographical inquiries could supplement the existing knowledge on Mukhina’s oeuvre, focusing
on the social and economic status, career perspectives, public reception, and professional success
of women artists in early Soviet Russia with its theoretically progressive policy on women’s
rights, but practically patriarchal art world.
9

10. Endnotes
10

11. i Brooks, Jeffrey. "Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All About It!" Slavic Review 53, no. 4(1994): 973-991. Historian
Jeffrey Brooks concludes that socialist realism was not an unwanted method of artistic production single-handedly forced
upon the artists by a tyrant as his personal whim. It rather “depended on the larger public discourse which was beyond the
power of any one of the leaders to articulate or fully shape” (p. 991).
ii Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art, 83.
iii Isaak, Jo Anna. Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter (London: Routledge,
1996).
iv “Introduction to the Soviet Pavilion, the World’s Fair, New York, 1939,” in Banks, Miranda, ed. The Aesthetic Arsenal:
Socialist Realism under Stalin (Long Island City, N.Y.: Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum, 1993), 8-11.
v Boris Groys, “A Style and a Half. Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism,” 77.
vi Sarah Wilson, “The Soviet Pavilion in Paris,” in Bown, Matthew Cullerne and Brandon Taylor, eds. Art of the Soviets.
Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1993), 111-112.
vii Sarah Wilson, “The Soviet Pavilion in Paris,” in Bown, Matthew Cullerne and Brandon Taylor, eds. Art of the Soviets.
Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1993), 111-112.
viii See Vera Mukhina, A sculptor's thoughts, trans. Fainna Solasko (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953),
41. See also See also: Dariusz Konstantynow, "The most responsible sculpture of the last twenty years: Vera Mukhina's The
Worker and Collective-Farm Woman (1937)," in Art and Politics, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis and Piotr Paszkiewicz
(Warszawa: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1999), 141-152.
ix “Introduction to the Soviet Pavilion, the World’s Fair, New York, 1939,” in Banks, Miranda, ed. The Aesthetic Arsenal:
Socialist Realism under Stalin (Long Island City, N.Y.: Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum, 1993), 8-11.
x Arkin, “Introduction,” 7.
xi Jungen, "Vera Mukhina: Art Between Modernism and Socialist Realism," 43.
xii Jungen, "Vera Mukhina: Art Between Modernism and Socialist Realism," 43.
xiii Jungen, "Vera Mukhina: Art Between Modernism and Socialist Realism," 43.
xiv Mukhina taught there from 1927 until 1930. In 1926, for example, the faculty included Alexander Rodchenko, Gustavs
Klutsis, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin. For a basic outline of the VKHUTEMAS and VKHUTEIN procedures and practices
analyzed in line with Bauhaus and Werkbund activities in Germany, see Curtis, Sculpture 1900-1945, 189-212; and Éva
Forgács, “Parallel Fates? Weimar, Dessau and Moscow,” in The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (Budapest; New York:
Central European University Press, 1995), 182-193.
xv Yelena Vasilyevskaya, "Minuya bogov," in Vera Mukhina, 1889-1953 (Sankt-Peterburg: Palace Editions, 2009), 5-6. The
original source of Mukhina’s opinion: Mukhina V.I. “Khudozhestvennaya zhizn’ Parizha.” In Mukhina. Literaturno-
kriticheskoye naslediye. Moskva, 1960, t.1., s.131.
xvi Suzdalev quoted in: Yablonskaya, Women Artists of Russia's New Age, 1910-1935, 224.

12. xvii Arkin, "Introduction," 10.
xviii Jungen, "Vera Mukhina: Art Between Modernism and Socialist Realism," 38.
xix Ibid.
xx Curtis notes that “the stocky peasant figure was a regular part of the Socialist Realism developed after 1932 in the Soviet
Union,” but Mukhina’s Peasant Woman was created in 1927, well before the formulation of Socialist Realism doctrine.
Curtis, Sculpture 1900-1945, 223.
xxi Jungen, "Vera Mukhina: Art Between Modernism and Socialist Realism," 40.
xxii Bonnell argues that “there was no unambiguously heroic symbolic image of the female peasant comparable to the
rabotnitsa [female factory worker].” Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and
Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 82. Elizabeth Waters offers yet another perspective, stressing that
the “male figure was chosen to personify the Bolshevik regime,” quite contrary to the “convention in Western art
representing liberty and the nation as a woman or the practice, dating back to the eighteenth century, of deploying the
female figure as an allegory of revolutionary struggle and revolutionary government.” Waters also argues that “for all that
women’s rights were part of the Bolshevik program, they were seen as a secondary matter, subordinate to the political and
economic struggles of the (male) working class.” Even after the Russian Revolution, the male figure remained the universal
– the symbol of the proletariat, revolution, and the victory of the socialism. The female form, once allegory was abandoned,
played only a supportive role, standing for women or the peasantry, subordinate social groups.” Elizabeth Waters, "The
Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917-32," in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation,
ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine Worobec (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of
California Press, 1991), 228-232.
xxiii Victoria E. Bonnell, “The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s,” The American Historical Review 98,
no. 1 (1993), 55.
xxiv Barbara Alpern Engel shows that the rural communities in late tsarist Russia were patriarchal, under the rule of the
Russian Orthodox Church, and women especially had no rights and no power, not even talking about literacy: “the teachings
of the Russian Orthodox Church reinforced the patriarchal character of peasant households by emphasizing the need for
unconditional obedience of children to parents and women to men. The laws of the tsarist state reinforced it too. (. . . ) In
the family household, males as well as females remained subject to the father’s will so long as the father lived, and he
deployed their labor and disposed of their earnings according to household need. (. . . ) “When a woman married, her
husband’s authority replaced her father’s. (. . . ) Wifebeating served to demonstrate, as well as to reinforce, men’s authority
over every aspect of a woman’s life, including the domestic sphere which by custom was her own. Men controlled access to
the most important resource of peasant life, the land, which was held communally, not individually, in most of rural Russia.”
Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (Cambridge
[England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 13; 23-24. See also: Alfred G. Meyer, “The Impact of World War
I on Russian Women's Lives,” in Russia's Women, 161-89.
xxv Beatrice Farnsworth, “Village Women Experience the Revolution,” in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Beatrice Farnsworth
and Lynne Viola (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 145.
xxvi Lynne Viola, “Bab'i Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest During Collectivization,” in Russian Peasant Women, 190.
xxvii Lynne Viola, “Bab'i Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest During Collectivization,” 189.
xxviii Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 82.
xxix Vasilyevskaya, "Minuya Bogov," 6-7.

13. xxx Quoted in: Jungen, "Vera Mukhina: Art Between Modernism and Socialist Realism," 40.
xxxi “Na vystavke s muzhskim iskusstvom slabo, / Kuda bezhat’ot zhenskogo zasil’ya? / Vsekh pobedila Mukhinskaya baba
/ Moguchnost’yu odnoy i bez usil’ya.” Literal translation from Russian verse is mine. Quoted in Russian in: Bettina Jungen,
"Vera Mukhina: Art Between Modernism and Socialist Realism," Third Text 23, no. 1 (2009), 40, n. 16.