Socialist realism celebrates the worker as creator with muscles straining, tools in hand, actively building the world

Do you actually have a conception of Soviet & socialist art outside of the Western propagandistic portrayal of it? Now, I'm not an art historian or anything myself, but I'm pretty sure it was not in fact a Japanese bara manga about big sweaty workers with their hulking muscles swinging hammers around. The Soviet Union was a big country, with many separate republics and ethnicities (hence the name!), and I'm sure a variety of styles and artistic movements.

The Soviets were also pretty big on resorts with spa-style facilities, so portraying workers as only ever working wouldn't have even necessarily been the ideological line, especially after the Stakhanovites went out of fashion. And a bunch of socialist realist paintings aren't of workers at all, they're just Stalin or other important figures standing around looking cool