We Will Build Our Own New World

1981
Wrought copper
350 x 200 x 200 cm (11 ft. 6 in. x 6 ft. 7 in. x 6 ft. 7 in.)
Commissioned by Union of Artists of USSR for the All-Union Exhibition at Manezh, Moscow
Subsequently gifted to the Moscow University for the Humanities

The monument is located on the campus of Moscow University for the Humanities (MosGU), which was originally founded in 1944 to aid in the reconstruction of the postwar Soviet Union and to train future civil servants. 

Frangulyan’s monument is a trio of revolutionaries, cast in bronze and positioned atop a base that melds a massive gear cogwheel, anvil, and plow. A woman, an urban proletariat (based on her 1920s-style lace-up boots), stands in a pose of defiant victory. Her back is turned away from her male companions, two barefoot figures: one a hypermasculine worker, the other an older man with clenched fists. The imagery suggests that this trio were soldiers in a new world, whose destinies were shaped by their own labor.