I happened to come across a note of how this kind of “trophies” were used as a means of propaganda for improving efficiency and neatness (and morale?!?) in workplaces in the Stalinist Soviet Union, in the coffee table book Sovjet i bild (“The Soviet Union in pictures”, Tidens förlag, Stockholm 1946).
In the book there’s a photo from 1931 of a piggy made of cloth, meant to shame the workers at a tractor factory in Kharkov to make a better effort to keep their workplace clean … (As clean as a piggy would, one might assume, but unfortunately it’s based on the speciesist stereotype of piggies as “dirty”, which of course is only due to the squalid conditions in which humans keep them … V`(oo)´V)
The front inscription says: “I myself am a pig, I have seen innumerable other pigs, but for the first time in my life I see such a pigginess as here at your place.”
(Click to enlarge!)
