Flax

Bread

Yablonska's four-metre-wide threshing-floor scene, built from sketches made in the village of Letava in 1948 where 717 of 765 able-bodied villagers were women. It won a Stalin Prize in 1949 and a bronze medal at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, and hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery as a canonical work of Socialist Realism.

Morning

A thirteen-year-old girl — the artist's elder daughter Olena — doing morning exercises in the family's Kyiv flat, painted in the first light of the Khrushchev Thaw. Reproduced in 'Ogoniok', on postcards and in school readers, it became one of the most widely seen Soviet-era paintings, though Yablonska herself was never satisfied with it.

Youth

A boy with a rucksack stands at the edge of a small blue pond on a green pasture; Yablonska began the picture as a study of the pond at Sedniv and asked the boy, who wandered over from a nearby sports camp, to pose. Ukrainian critics read it as a manifesto of solitary self-possession and a step away from doctrinal Socialist Realism.

Collective Farm in Bloom

Hryhorii Svitlytskyi

Svitlytskyi's best-known Soviet-period landscape, a flowering orchard turned into an image of collectivised abundance only three years after the Holodomor. It shows how his lyrical light painting was recruited to the required optimism of the 1930s.