He graduated from the Institute during the Great Patriotic War, and by the end of the 1940s, he was teaching at the Valdivostok Art College where he was chairman of the local art union. He returned to Moscow in the 1950s, where he lived and worked until his death. Kostin's work is part of the Social Realism movement in Soviet Russia. This movement was influenced by the preference of Communist leaders such as V. I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin for conservative Realistic paintings. The painting is now in a private collection.
Many people consider something to be art only if it portrays some lofty ideal or setting.
Introduce Classicism and Impressionism to your students, identifying the defining stylistic characteristics of each. Examples of these different styles should be available in all good art history texts. Discuss this blended style peculiar to Soviet art and ask students to identify how it compares with and differs from classicism and impressionism, as defined earlier. This was somewhat like the spirit of social conscience that moved the American Great Depression artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Stewart Curry to paint along similar lines. In a class discussion, ask students to compare the works of these American artists to the works of the Soviet artist, Mikhail Kostin, describing the similarities and differences.