In March 1976, when doing the rounds of the Barvikha sanatorium outside Moscow, a doctor found the once-celebrated architect Boris Iofan unconscious in his armchair. He was holding a drawing of a statue, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman by Vera Mukhina, that had surmounted Iofan’s most famous built work, the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. He had been working up proposals, obsessively perhaps, for a less ignominious setting than the one where this sculpture had ended up, on an undersized plinth in a Moscow exhibition ground.
