The cover of Against the Liberal Order features a statue from what used to be the repairs workshop in the textile factory in Kayseri. At the center of an industrial cogwheel, a figure pushes heroically upward—an almost Sisyphean image.

 

I have been unable to confirm accounts of the statue’s origins, including one that ascribes the work to a Soviet sculptor. But I have discovered that a similar statue was erected in the 1930s for the Sümerbank pavilion at the İzmir international exposition, at a site without the Soviet connections of the factory in Kayseri. Nevertheless, by the end of the Second World War the muscular ambitions of the 1930s had become an embarrassment, as the fig leaf below attests.