Curator, Ellen Lupton: We're looking at a poster by Maria Bri-Bein, an image of an industrial kitchen and one of the cooks is a woman and she's testing the quality of the soup. Women in the Soviet Union increasingly entered the workforce with the advent of Stalin's five-year plan, which was 1928 to 1932.
Professor Stephen Kotkin: The five-year plan was an enormously successful piece of propaganda. It was supposed to be about planning the economy and having a massive growth spurt in GDP. There was no planning. It was very chaotic, but the idea was extremely catchy. You could, for example, put up output quotas and say how much steel should be produced, how much coal should be mined. And you could then print the statistics showing that you exceeded your quotas. With these quantitative statistical presentations, which were on all of the posters, they created the sense that the country was moving forward, building this new world of heavy industrial factories and could compete better than the capitalists at the new technology, but also were supposedly more just because there was supposedly no exploiting class. It didn't happen. But for a time, the dreams were very powerful.