Deineka’s The Conversation of the Collective Farm Brigade is a very interesting piece of art because it exlimpifies Alexander Deineka’s transitional career from modernism to Socialist realism. In Christina Kair’s article “Was Socialist Realism Forced Labor”, she explains that “Deineka was actively attempting to find a way to work within the famously opaque proclamation of Socialist Realism as ‘the depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. Deineka’s retreat from the pictorial instability of the earlier, modernist work would, in the dominant narrative of the demise of the avant-garde under the pressure of Socialist Realism, signal a transition from a – good – dialectical socialist body to a – bad – stabilized, Stalinist one” (327).

Deineka began to participate in Soviet contract system called kontraktatsiia, “in which
branches of the central state commissioning agency, VseKoKhudozhnik, entered into contracts with artists, stipulating that a certain number of works be produced within a certain period of time – often works on
a certain theme, or works to be produced on the basis of a paid field trip or kommandirovka, undertaken individually or in organized groups, to agricultural or industrial destinations” (334). However, despite this contract system and its stipulations that artists create art to a certain theme, Deineka’s “Construction of the Collective Farm Brigade” work is full of defiance. The art piece is full of confusion and it appears that the figures are asking questions about the collective farm rather than being full of confidence. Kiaer writes “The very pictorial form of this highprofile commissioned work, in other words, inserts a moment of doubt about how the collective farm will achieve the wished-for socialist community, and thus shares the reticence of Deineka’s other pictures of
Soviet bodies” (335).

Thus, although Deineka was restricted in many senses by the Soviet contracting system, he still was able to protest in an artistic way through “The Construction”. The reason behind this was because he didn’t agree with the lack of artistic freedom that existed within the Soviet Union at the time.