Soviet monumental sculpture: between freedom of creativity and a political gesture (on the example of the Mukhina's works "Wind" and "Worker and collective farmer")

The sculptures «Wind» and «Worker and Collective Farmer» were created by V. Mukhina with a difference of ten years (in 1926 and 1936).The time gap between them is very small, but nevertheless they belong to fundamentally different periods of the development of the Soviet system. A comparative analysis of these iconic art-works allows us to trace the socio-cultural transformations and the contradictions associated with them, which are reflected in the dichotomies «artist - power» and «creative freedom - official ideology». The author of the article explores the relations within these dichotomies on the example of Mukhina’s creativity. This study shows the dramaturgy of Soviet art culture: the artist sincerely believes in the high ideals of communism and sees the basis of the ideological content of the new art in socialist realism on the one hand, but he has and defends his own creative position in understanding the tasks of this art and ways to solve them on the other hand.