In May 2025, a photograph of a high relief at the Taganskaya station went viral on the Internet, where the Soviet leader, from a certain angle, looks very much like the writer Dmitry Bykov. We checked if this photo is real.
May 15, 2025 at the Moscow metro station "Taganskaya" opened a sculptural group in the center of which Joseph Stalin is depicted. The high relief was recreated for the 90th anniversary of the capital's subway and, according to statements Moscow Department of Transport, was supposed to be an exact copy of the composition destroyed in 1966 as part of de-Stalinization. However, the public reaction turned out to be ambiguous: some criticized the high relief because of the odiousness of Stalin’s personality, others because of the dubious quality of the reconstruction. Designer Artemy Lebedev named new art object “passing shit sculpture”.
Soon, a photograph of a high relief began to circulate on the Internet, in which Stalin’s face at a certain angle is very similar to the face of the writer Dmitry Bykov. Posts on social networks (X, Facebook, Threads, "VKontakte", Telegram, YouTube) and on blogging platforms This image, which is sometimes accompanied by a photo of the writer for comparison, receives hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes and reposts.
Many Russian media outlets wrote about the discovery of the restored high relief at the Taganskaya metro station, and some of them (for example, the Moscow City News Agency) photographed and filmed on video sculptural group in all details and from any possible angles. As you can see from their photographs and videos, the real high relief has nothing in common with the image being distributed, where Stalin is like two peas in a pod.
“Verified” suggested that the viral image was created using neural networks, but the service Hive Moderation, who specializes in AI content recognition, assessed this probability as extremely low (less than 3%). However, the service The Photoshop Detector, which recognizes image processing in Photoshop and other photo editors, on the contrary, gave a positive result.
This image first appeared on Facebook in the comments of post local historian Alexey Orlov, published on May 19, 2025 at 14:44 Moscow time. The author of the post himself attached a real photograph of the high relief and a photo of Bykov, noting the very distant external similarity with the remark: “So that’s who is depicted! Secret protest! An hour later, user Nina Danilevskaya published in the comments an already edited photo of the high relief, in which Stalin’s face had been corrected to resemble Bykov’s face. User Dmitry Vladimirovich immediately suggested replacing the photo of the real sculpture with an edited image in all posts about the high relief on Taganskaya: “Just change the picture - no one will notice. Everyone will remember what it looks like.” And he really replaced in his post, published earlier in the day, a photo of Stalin from a high relief to an image with Bykov's face without notes that it had been processed.
Thus, the real high relief of Stalin at the Taganskaya metro station in Moscow has nothing in common (except perhaps a mustache) with Dmitry Bykov. This is an edited image created by a Facebook user that others knowingly chose to circulate as the original.
Cover photo: social networks
Read on the topic:
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- Is it true that this portrait depicts the woman who became the model for the Statue of Liberty?
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