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Painter, graphic artist, engraver, sculptor, illustrator, poster designer, teacher. Born in the family of a peasant called Fyodor Pakhomov in the village of Varlamovo in Vologda Province (1900). Attended school in the nearby town of Kadnikov and moved to Petrograd (1915), where he studied under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vasily Shukhayev and Serge Tchekhonine at the Baron Stieglitz Central School of Technical Drawing (1915–17), Nikolai Tyrsa and Vladimir Lebedev at the VKhUTEMAS (1920–22) and Alexei Karev and Alexander Savinov at the VKhUTEIN (1922–25). Taught drawing in Kadnikov (1918), designed posters for the Russian Telegraph Agency (1919) and served in the Red Army (1919–20). Member of the Unification of New Trends in Art (1921–22), founding member of the Circle of Artists (1926–32), board member of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists (from 1932). Collaborated with the New Robinson and Life of Art magazines (from 1923), worked under Vladimir Lebedev at the department of children’s literature of the State Publishing House (from 1925) and for the Hedgehog children’s magazine (1929–35). Illustrated Arkady Gaidar’s RMC (1925), Yevgeny Schwartz’s The Camp (1925), In the Frost (1927) and The Bucket (1929), Nikolai Tikhonov’s From Sea to Sea (1926), Agnia Barto’s The Pioneer (1927), Samuel Marshak’s The Master (1927), The Ball (1933) and The Two Lazybones and the Cat (1935), Ivan Turgenev’s Bezhin Meadow (1936–37), Nikolai Nekrasov’s Grandfather Frost the Red Nose (1937–38), Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Story of Vlas the Lazybones and Do-Nothing (1942), Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How The Steel was Tempered (1947–48), Sergei Mikhalkov’s Important Matters (1956) and Our Friendly Family (1959), Alexei Tolstoy’s Nikita’s Childhood (1959), Valentina Oseyeva’s Before the First Rain (1968) and The Magic Word (1971) and Leo Tolstoy’s Filipok (1968–70) and Pages from the Alphabet (1970–72). Painted images of Soviet women (late 1920s) and nudes (early 1930s) and worked on such series of lithographs as Leningrad Palace of Pioneers (1939–40), Leningrad in the Days of the War and Siege (1942–44), Leningrad in the Days of Restoration (1945–47) and At the Red Partisan Collective Farm (1960). Taught at the Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1948–73, professor from 1949). Died in Leningrad and buried at the Cemetery of St John the Theologian (1973). Contributed to exhibitions (from 1921). Contributed to exhibitions of Russian art in the United States (1925) and Japan (1927), Venice Biennale (1930), Thirtieth Annual International Exhibition of Paintings at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (1931), Baltimore Museum of Art (1932) and City Art Museum in St Louis (1932), Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris (1937, gold medal) and one-man shows in Leningrad (1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1951, 1960, 1970, 1973) and Moscow (1960, 1970). Honoured Artist of the RSFSR (1945), People’s Artist of the USSR (1971). Full member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (1964), winner of the Stalin Prize (1946) and the State Prize (1973).