The statue ‘Worker’ was created by the celebrated sculptor Ivan Shadr. The artist chose a very expressive angle to portray the worker: his torso, hands and face are tense, and there is great strength hidden in his muscular body.

Sculptor Ivan Shadr studied in Yekaterinburg and furthered his education in St Petersburg and Europe. By the 1920s, he became actively involved in the cultural revolution dedicating his works to the new reality and its heroes. For example, his statue ‘The Cobblestone Is the Weapon of the Proletariat’ achieved great popularity and became a symbol of the workers’ movement.

Several years before, the sculptor worked on a high-profile order from Goznak — a company that is responsible for the development and manufacturing of banknotes, state orders, certificate templates, and many other products. Ivan Shadr was asked to design several generalized images of the contemporary heroes: a worker, a peasant, a Red Army soldier, and a seedsman. Later these statues would be photographed from the right angle and made into prints, in order to place these images on the first Soviet banknotes, postage stamps and securities.

Ivan Shadr took a fundamental approach to the preparation for this work. In the summer of 1922, he traveled to his home area in the vicinity of Shadrinsk. There he studied the archetypes of local peasants and workers to be able to create true-to-life portraits. Interestingly, the sculptor lived in that area only during his childhood, but he cherished the memories of this place for the rest of his life. Even his last name is actually a pseudonym. The artist wrote:

By engaging regular people instead of professional models in posing for the statues, the sculptor managed to create deep and profound works. He was able to come up with generalized images of dignified people while also achieving the verisimilitude of actual character types. As a result, each of the four figures became a universal symbol of that period. One of the reasons was the wide circulation of the images due to their portrayal on banknotes and postage stamps — they were even referred to as the “money fellows”.