Dmitri Mochalsky (1908–1988) entered Soviet painting as a master of the thematic picture, but he did not find himself at once. Behind him lay a serious training: he studied under Dmitri Kardovsky, and then, in Leningrad, under Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, whose feeling for grand form and color stayed with him forever.
The war years gave him a subject of historic scale — the picture "Victory. Berlin. 9 May 1945" (1947) and a graphic cycle about the Soviet troops in the fallen capital of the Reich. But the painter found his true theme only as a mature man, when in the mid-1950s he set off for the Kazakh steppes in the wake of those who broke the virgin lands.
From 1954 was born the long-running series "People of the Virgin Lands" — dozens of canvases and studies about the labor and daily life of young people on the newly plowed lands. Mochalsky painted not a ceremonial feat but a living human note: sunburned faces, wind over the steppe, life in tents, the vast sky. The official subject of the age he translated into lyric, closer to a genre scene than to a poster.
For these works he was awarded the State Prize of the RSFSR, and in 1980 he received the title of People's Artist of the USSR. For half a century, from 1937, Mochalsky taught at the Surikov Institute in Moscow, passing on his understanding of the picture to more than one generation of painters.