Amshey Nurenberg met the person portrayed in this painting during a creative trip to the Southern Ural area. He depicted the shock worker Fyodor Makarov, who worked at the Zlatoust mechanical plant named after Vladimir Lenin.

As of today, art experts have found four paintings depicting the plant’s workers, and the museum collection houses them all. The canvases “Abramov — Best Shock Worker of the Forge Shop”, “Volokitina — Best Shock Worker of the Shop named after Mikhail Frunze”, “Kalman — Best Shock Worker of the Rolling Shop”, and “Shock Worker and Inventor Makarov” celebrate the best workers’ achievements in production.

The last painting is of particular interest. The artist portrayed Fyodor Makarov in the engineer’s office: a blueprint can be seen on the wall behind him, and there are notes, a ruler, and a calculator lying on the table. Makarov’s serious and thoughtful gaze goes beyond the canvas. In the 1930s, the image of an intellectual thinker from a working-class environment seemed entirely new, so portraits like this were rare.

Fyodor Makarov was indeed a thinker and experimenter, as well as the inventor of a certain device. Nadezhda Glybovskaya, a writer for the oldest newspaper ‘Zlatoustovsky Rabochiy’ (Zlatoust worker), did some research to find out what kind of device Makarov had invented and found the following words in Nikolay Verzakov’s book:

Makarov’s portrait was first presented at the ‘Socialist Construction in the Ural Region’ exhibition in 1932, and it was viewed as timely and crucial for that era, for it portrayed a new hero of those times.

Regrettably, the Zlatoust series received far less attention than the paintings created during Nurenberg’s creative trip to Kuzbass (Kuzbass stands for the Kuznetsk coal basin and is the second name of the Kemerovo region in Siberia). The painter went there soon after he visited the Southern Urals with his brother David Devinov. At one point, the paintings created in Siberia were even cataloged, and so it is natural that researchers took more interest in them than in the Ural series.