Swords to ploughshares

Located in front of the UN building in New York (the USA).

For the symbolic statue, the name was taken from the texts of the Old Testament; they contain predictions that peoples will stop fighting and convert weapons into sickles, ploughs and other peaceful tools. The call for rejection of hostility was relevant, and the compositional solution developed by the author of the sculpture was eloquent. A muscular man, whose hands easily hold both a symbolically huge sword and a heavy hammer, definitely does not want war. His athletically beautiful body (Olympic wrestler B. Gurevich was the model for the sculptor) shows determination and even bitterness against what death brings. In addition to the original, the author’s copies are located in the park of the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, in the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk (Kazakhstan), at the entrance of the Volgograd Plant, where Vuchetich made elements of the Mamaev Kurgan memorial.