We Smite the False Shock Workers
Artist
Artist Unidentified (Russian)
Title
We Smite the False Shock Workers
Creation Date
1931
Century
mid-20th century
Object Type
print
Creation Place
Asia, Russia
Medium and Support
lithograph on paper
Credit Line
Generously lent by Svetlana and Eric Silverman ’85, P’19
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Completing the Five-Year Plans ahead of schedule became a form of social competition, and the problem of “false shock workers” (“lzheudarniki”) emerged. Unlike super-workers performing fits of heroic labor, “false shock workers” inflated the reports of their labor in order to secure state-granted privileges that included premium pay, allocations for housing, goods, promotions into management, and publicity. This poster exhorts workers to become true shock workers, while crushing the head of a supine, hung-over impostor. A compositional wedge—reminiscent of El Lissitsky’s “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” (1919), with its black-and-white, cartoon-like vignettes—depicts the day-to-day bad behavior of a cheat. The hammer’s dynamic movement through space traces the contours of another Soviet symbol—the sickle—thus forming the iconic hammer-and-sickle symbol. Additionally, the red silhouette of Promethean foundry workers forms a single body, their tools becoming extensions of their bodies.
