Moscow Guide
The northern suburbs
The Worker and Collective Farm Girl monument
Address: Past the main entrance to the VVTs
The iconic monument, the Worker and Collective Farm Girl (Rabochy i kolkhoznitsa), was designed by Vera Mukhina for the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo. Its colossal twin figures stride in unison, raising the hammer and sickle. Weighing sixty tonnes apiece and fashioned from stainless-steel blocks, they were lauded as the embodiment of Soviet industrial progress and rationalism, though in fact each block had been handmade and the finished monument was rigorously scrutinized due to fears that Trotsky's profile could be seen in the folds of the drapery. Once it had been erected outside the VDNKh, Stalin was taken to view it at night, and loved it.
As Communism collapsed fifty years later, homeless people sheltered in the monument's interior (accessible by a hatch beneath the Farm Girl's skirts) like the student who installed himself inside El Lissitsky's street-sculpture The Red Wedge Invades the White Square in the winter of 1918. Another slap in the face for true-believers came in the 1990s, when the statues were illicitly dressed in overalls to advertise a brand of clothing.