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Moscow’s industrial workers

    Colorful sunlit photo shows a worker parade on a street in Moscow in 1931. The parade is led by an all-male brass band, with a drummer boy in the lead; behind the band are women carrying a flowing red banner with large white lettering.

    Holidays that celebrated professions—mass festivals held in honor of factory and plant workers—were very popular in Moscow during the 1930s. Paul Robeson celebrated the Russians, especially the so-called proletariat, for what he experienced as their racial tolerance. Unbeknownst to him, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was industrializing at (literally) breakneck speed at the cost of mass starvation in the Ukraine (then a Soviet state), which was denied the grain its collectivized farms were forced to ship eastward to the Soviet Union’s large cities.

    1931
    Copyright
    Public Domain
    Attribution/Credit

    Photo by Branson DeCou; “Old Moscow and St. Petersburg through an American Photographer’s Lens,” The Moscow Times (“independent news from Russia”), 13 December 2019, accessed from https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/13/old-moscow-and-st-petersburg-through-an-american-photographers-lens-a68616, 25 March 2022