I.A. Radimov.
Painting “Lenin Enrolment in 1924”
USSR, Moscow. 1924

The painting, dedicated to the mass entry of workers into the Party after the death of Lenin, can serve as a kind of collective portrait of “their own”. There are no specific historical characters on it; the artist conveys the unifying principle of the party’s recruits – a willingness to serve the cause of revolution and building a new society, despite the difficulties. The picture illustrated the official version of the Lenin Enrolment as an exclusively mass initiative. In fact, the campaign was directed and controlled by authorities and was aimed at overcoming the Party’s crisis of the early 1920s, a symptom of which was the separation of the Party from the workers and, as a result, the decline of its authority among them.