Facing Albert Speer's German Nazi pavilion, massive and crowned with an eagle, the Soviet pavilion, 160 metres long was surmounted by a gigantic steel group statue representing Agriculture and Industry by Vera Moukhina showing a worker and a Kolkhoz woman, brandishing sickle and hammer. At their feet, allegories of the eleven Soviet republics decorated two large side panels. Works by Joseph Tchaïkov, it was these reliefs, showing spinners, workers in overalls, musicians, a child … that were discovered in Baillet-en-France in 2004.
In fact, the group statue of Agriculture and Industry went back to Moscow, but the Tchaïkov reliefs were donated by the USSR to a trade union, the Confédération générale du Travail. At that time the left-wing Front Populaire was in power and the statues were accepted by the Union fraternelle de la Métallurgie and placed in the park of the château of Baillet-en-France, acquired in 1937 by the trade union as a vacation centre for the metal-workers during the first annual paid vacations.
When the Communist Party (PCF) and the left-wing union (CGT) were banned in 1939 the château was confiscated and became a centre of the Petainist youth movement, having previously been used as an internment camp for political prisoners. In the spring of 1941, the statues were destroyed. On the Liberation, for a time displayed on the ground, they were relegated and forgotten in an ice-house … until their rediscovery by an archaeologist.