ABSTRACT
Translating the official claims of the new vanguard, the sculpture was also meant to represent men and women's joint struggle for emancipation, with peasants added to industrial workers in contradiction to Marx's concept of a proletarian revolution. The 'prophetic realism' of the Soviet Pavilion was intended to infuse the Eiffel Tower, built on the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, with new purpose. Placed on a monumental pedestal, a landing halfway up the ceremonial stairs, the Gosudarstvennyi Avtozavod reflected the Soviet eagerness to catch up with America's technology, and in particular to conquer the redemptive mythology of the assembly line that created the legend of the United States industry. The Paris Expo coincided with the rule of the Popular Front government in France, dominated by the socialists, and the Soviets felt they could safely display a dramatic hammer and sickle carried by an industrial worker and a Kolkhoz woman.
