While designing the USSR pavilion for the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris, the pavilion’s architect Boris Iofan came up with the idea to create a monument depicting a young worker and peasant woman. The sculpture was to become the personification of the ideals of the new Soviet state, in which power belonged to the proletariat. The competition for the creation of the monument was won by the sculptor Vera Mukhina, who, according to Iofan, “picked up the idea.”
This is how one of the main unofficial symbols of the USSR was born – the “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” monument. The success of the Soviet pavilion, crowned with an almost 25-meter sculpture of young proletarians, provided Mukhina with fame in the Soviet Union and beyond, the Stalin Prize of the first degree, and later the title of People’s Artist of the USSR and membership in the USSR Academy of Arts. In addition to sculpture, Vera Mukhina was engaged in clothing design and worked a lot with glass – the artist is often credited with the authorship of the design of a faceted glass.