Mordovian History Museum · CC BY-SA 4.0

Became the Soviet Union's defining portraitist of its own leadership, painting Lenin repeatedly — Lenin in Smolny among the most reproduced images of the era — in a polished, illusionistic style that became the template for socialist realism. The first painter awarded the Order of Lenin, he ran the Leningrad art academy from 1934 and used the position to train a generation of Soviet painters. He was also a serious collector, later donating his holdings of Repin and Surikov to Ukrainian museums.