Vera Mukhina’s famous statue - The Worker and The Collective Farm Girl - has gone missing from its rightful place outside Moscow’s VDNK.
Officially, the ultimate icon of the Soviet Union is being restored. But no-one is going to see it again anytime soon. Meanwhile, Moscow without this landmark is like Paris without the Eiffel Tower.

The statue - which originally crowned the Soviet Pavillion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, was made of sheet stainless steel and, in its day, featured some fairly innovative spot-welding. Vera liked things larger than life, and these figures are awesome - 24 metres tall and weighing 75 tons.

Newspaper reports suggest that the money earmarked for restoration has all been spent on researching how to do it exactly. One report hints at a cash bid from an American collector, another that it will next adorn a shopping mall. So far it’s taken two years to make no progress. As it happens, Vera’s team built the original sculpture from scratch in three months. Obviously, they knew how to get things done under Stalin.

Vera’s last work was the figurine on the Volgograd Planetarium