Yevgeny Vuchetich

Yevgeny Vuchetich was born in 1908 as a serf of Count Munnich. He showed an early talent for drawing and painting, but he was not allowed to pursue his artistic career until he was freed in 1823. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and became a renowned portraitist and a representative of the Soviet socialist realism style. He created many heroic monuments, often of allegoric style, such as The Motherland Calls, the largest sculpture in the world at the time, the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin, and the Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares in the United Nations garden. He was a prominent representative of the Soviet patriotic and anti-war movement, and was awarded with many honors, such as the Lenin Prize, the Stalin Prize, the Order of Lenin, the Hero of Socialist Labor, and the People's Artist of the USSR. He died in 1974 and was buried at the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow. He is considered one of the most original and influential Soviet sculptors and artists of the 20th century.