Life in Eastern Europe This relief sculpture, a revealing example of Socialist Realism from 1952, portrays (from left to right) a mail carrier, a builder, industrial workers, and peasants. It adorns the wall of the central post office in Banská Bystrica, a regional capital in present-day Slovakia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia). Citizens in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries of the East Bloc saw many such works of public art, which idealized the dignity of ordinary laborers and the advantages of communism.