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"In the Fight for Human Happiness, in Every Victory – Women's Participation!" (1980s) by Alexey Kurmanaevsky and Elena Kurmanaevskaya is a preparatory sketch for Agitplakat Don, made during the 1980s modernisation of the Soviet textile industry, a sector where women made up the majority of the workforce.
A female textile worker stands at the centre, wearing a pink headscarf and blue work clothing, threads running diagonally across the composition as she works them. Behind her, a backdrop of spires and towers arranged in a semi-circle — Soviet architecture standing in for the broader industrial project her labour supports.
The colour palette is the most distinctive thing about the piece: pink, blue, and golden yellow, worked together with more restraint than the red-and-black scheme typical of Soviet propaganda. The threads crossing the figure double as a visual idea — labour as something woven into a larger structure, individual work tied to collective output.
The line work draws on Constructivist principles — clean, geometric, mechanically precise — suited to a subject about industrial production, but applied with enough softness in the colour handling that the image reads as much as craft as ideology.
Kurmanaevsky worked extensively in social and political poster design; Kurmanaevskaya brought a bold visual approach to environmental and social messaging. Their work is held in the State Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve, the Rybinsk State Historical-Architectural and Art Museum-Reserve, the Rostov Regional Museum of Fine Arts, the Auschwitz Museum in Poland, the Museum of Modern Art in Kajaani, Finland, and the Glasgow Museum in Scotland.
