Staliniana as a Tool for the Myth Fortification: Once Again about Stalin’s Visits to Razliv

Historians have long been studying in detail the story of I.V. Stalin visiting V.I. Lenin in Razliv. The main subject of their interest is whether this event took place in reality. Most of modern authors agree that it did not. This article does not dispute this verdict, because it is not about the event itself, but about the history of the mythologeme’s origin and the forms of its representation in the culture of the Stalin era.

Researchers have not ye raised the question of why this story was introduced by Stalin into the updated version of his own official biography only thirty years after the events described in it. Meanwhile, appealing to it makes it possible not only to comprehend the reasons and goals of mythologizing individual episodes of the leader’s biography at the culmination stage of building his cult, but also to study the methods and forms of using cultural tools to achieve such goals.

The article focuses mainly on visual representations of the mythological story. However, it was important not only to analyze and classify the new unstudied iconographic schemes that had never been studied by anyone before, but also to see them in a historical and cultural context. This approach made it possible to demonstrate how the Soviet representation strategies had been “working” under the conditions of the permanent expansion of the leader’s “life story”, as well as how the universally proclaimed slogan about the immense veneration of the teacher Lenin by his student Stalin had been adjusted over time. The fact that the story of “Stalin in Razliv” had remained for a long time beyond the attention of the leader himself and the ideologists of his cult (i.e. it had been considered unworthy of special efforts) and was included in his biography only seven years before his death, makes the analysis proposed in the article even more comprehensive.

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