The Soviet Union existed for almost 70 years, until it collapsed 33 years ago. The idea of the Soviet Union as a country started out as an act of revolution against the autocratic rulers of the Russian Empire, which had, for all intents and purposes, enslaved about 35% of the population of Russia (or more - hard to get an accurate number at this stage of the game) for most of the 304 years of the rule of the Russian Tzars.
They called the enslaved people "Serfs".
Serfs were slaves, plain and simple. Serfdom is forced labor, forced labor is slavery.
For reasons beyond the keen of my intellect many people, Academics included, fail to recognize that millions of Caucasians were enslaved throughout Europe for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. The label "slavery" is rarely used to describe serfdom, but again, serfdom was slavery - read Chernyshevsky's's What is to Be Done? or Kolchin's Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom for far better insight into this topic.
Many of my ancestors were serfs who fled Eastern Europe in search of a better life in the United States. My maternal grandfather was born near Panevezys, Lithuania, in 1888. He has my eternal gratitude for possessing the courage and fortitude to get the hell out of that part of the world before the Nazis or Soviets could get to him (as they did to several other of my ancestors).
But I digress. After the co-founder/ first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, died in 1924, his replacement, Joseph Stalin, ruled with a progressively tyrannical tilt from 1924 until his death in 1953. His absolute control of the country put to shame the authority of the Russian Tzars.
Stalin controlled every aspect of life in the Soviet Union, and to act contrary to his particular interpretation of Marxism - Leninism (known as Stalinism, of course) would likely end up with the offender either being exiled/imprisoned in Siberia or execution as an enemy of the state (if you're not familiar with that ugly chapter of world history, I suggest reading The Black Book of Communism, or if you don't have the time or patience for that lengthy tome, at least The Gulag Archipelago or maybe One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
Stalin's control even extended to what could be not only considered art, but what could be produced as art. Socialist realism, as the official cultural doctrine was known, mandated idealized depictions of the proletariat and life in the Soviet Union, though the depictions had to be story book literal.
What that boiled down to was a lot of artists spending a lot of time painting or sculpting glorified factory workers and Joseph Stalin.
After Stalin's death however, the floodgates were sort of opened to allow artists of most every stripe a little more freedom (but not too much freedom...the Gulags were still open to receiving those who pushed the envelope a little too hard)
One such artist was a man named Viktor Popkov (1932 - 1974). He was one of the first of a wave of young Soviet artists in the late 1950's, early 1960's, to embrace Khrushchev's lessening of the Stalinist restrictions. His paintings depicted a much more realistic view of daily Soviet life and the ordinary people of the USSR. He also added a radically new palette, heretofore unseen darker, gloomier colors that conveyed the mood of life under the heel of a tyrant's boot.
That school of Soviet art is now referred to as the "severe style".
One doesn't hear much about Viktor Popkov these days, though there is a biography with 280 illustrations available on Amazon. Not much of his work is known to exist in North America though - the last work of his offered at auction here (a small oil on board sketch painted in 1960) went unsold in 2008.
Here are a few examples of his work:
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