In May 2025, a picture of the high relief at the Taganskaya station was dispersed over the network, where the Soviet leader at a certain perspective is very similar to the writer Dmitry Bykov. We checked whether this is the present photo.
May 15, 2025 at the Moscow Metro station "Taganskaya" opened The sculptural group, in the center of which is depicted by Joseph Stalin. The high relief was recreated to the 90th anniversary of the metropolitan subway and, by statements The Moscow Department of Transport was supposed to become an exact copy of the composition, destroyed in 1966 as part of the decolinization. However, the reaction of the public turned out to be ambiguous: some criticized the high relief due to the odious personality of Stalin, others because of the dubious quality of reconstruction. Designer Artemy Lebedev and at all He called it The new art object "Passing govnoskulptura".
Soon, a picture of the high relief began to disperse on the network, on which Stalin's face at a certain angle is very similar to the face of the writer Dmitry Bykov. Social net posts (X, Facebook, Threads, "VKontakte" Telegram, YouTube) and on Blog-platforms With this image, to which a writer’s photo is sometimes attached to comparison, hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes and reposts are gaining.
Many Russian media wrote about the opening of a restored high relief at the Taganskaya metro station, and some of them (for example, the Moscow News Agency) photographed And they took off on video The sculptural group in all details and from any possible angles. As you can see from their pictures and rollers, nothing in common with the distributed image, where Stalin, like two drops of water, looks like Bykov, has a real high relief.
“Verified” suggested that the viral image was created using neural networks, but the service HIVE MODERATION, specializing in the recognition of AI-Contain, appreciated such a probability as extremely low (less than 3%). However, the service The Photoshop Detector, recognizing images in Photoshop and other photo editors, on the contrary, gave a positive result.
This image first appeared on Facebook in the comments to post local historian Alexei Orlov, published on May 19, 2025 at 14:44 Moscow time. The author of the post attached a real picture of the high relief and the photo of Bykov, noting a very distant external similarity with a remark: “So who is depicted! Secret protest! " An hour later, the user Nina Danilevskaya published in the comments an already edited photo of the high relief, in which Stalin's face was corrected to resemble Bykov's face. The user of Dmitry Vladimirovich immediately proposed replacing in all posts about the high relief on the “Taganskaya” photo of a real sculpture on an edited image: “Just change the picture - no one will notice. Everyone will remember what looks like that. ” And he really replaced in his post, published earlier on the same day, a photo of Stalin from a high relief to an image with the face of Bykov without droppings that it had been processed.
Thus, a real high relief with Stalin at the Taganskaya metro station in Moscow has nothing to do with Dmitry Bykov. This is an edited image created by the Facebook user, which others consciously decided to spread under the guise of the original.
Photo on the cover: social networks
Read on the topic:
- Forbes. Stalin designer: why a new monument appeared in the Moscow metro
- Did Stalin say: “There is no person - there is no problem”?
- Is it true that the Novokuznetskaya metro station decorates benches from the blown up Cathedral of Christ the Savior?
- Is it true that this portrait depicts a woman who has become a model for a statue of freedom?
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