The painting ‘Conspiracy of the Kulaks’ was created by Boris Ioganson — a prominent representative of Socialist Realism art. This movement focused on promoting certain ideas rather than on using pictorial techniques (the application of paint, choice of colors and composition lines). Socialist Realism artists strove to glorify Communist values and condemn those who opposed them.

This particular painting was supposed to criticize ‘kulaks’ (a derogatory Soviet term for wealthy farmers). Official documents from the first third of the 20th century sometimes included these words:

The word ‘kulak’, which means ‘a clenched fist’, had already been used before by villagers to describe usurers and those who engaged farmworkers for a meager fee. It was said that such landowners held their villages in ‘kulak’ (in a clenched fist). That expression was caught up by the Soviet propaganda campaign.

Boris Ioganson portrayed kulaks as utterly disgusting. He hyperbolized their corruptness: they appear to be gorging themselves with no hint of dignity. The grimaces of their faces clearly express deceit, greediness, grudge, and stupidity.

Despite choosing the ideological subjects, Ioganson still managed to avoid stiffness in his paintings. He was a student of a famous Russian artist Konstantin Korovin who had a penchant for using bright colors, broad brush strokes and effects of sunlight and air in his paintings.

Professor Zaytsev, an assistant at Boris Ioganson Workshop (who would later be put in charge of it), as well as Ioganson’s students Sokolov, Trufanov and Lavrenko recalled that:

They also mentioned Ioganson’s fascination with the ‘melted’ surface of a canvas. Once he happened to see Mikhail Trufanov’s studies that were performed inside a shop floor overheated from a working blast furnace. The heat diluted oil paints so that they crawled, making the texture of the painting surface extraordinarily beautiful. To achieve such result, Boris Ioganson used to take a scolding hot iron, draw it close to the painting surface and move around until the paints slightly melted.

Ioganson wrote, “I like dense, rich paints, for they are best suited to render the dimensional characteristics of objects and portray figures and faces”.