"THE WORST ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE": IN SEARCH OF THE IMAGE (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF THE EXHIBITION "REVOLUTIONARY SPAIN FIGHTING AGAINST FASCISM", MUSEUM OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGION OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE USSR, 1936-1939)
In the 1930s, the academic and museum communities took part in the political myth-making process. Being under strong ideological pressure, the state institutions lost employees during the Great Purge years. At the permanent and temporary exhibitions, researchers from the Museum of the History of Religion (MIR) of the Academy of Sciences founded in 1932 were representing archetypes and images actualized in other spheres of culture. Mainly, those archetypes were the ones of the hero and the enemy. The article concerns approaches and methods used in museum practice for constructing and maintaining the image of the enemy, which was extremely important for the mythology of Stalin’s era. The author focused on the exhibition “Revolutionary Spain Fighting against Fascism” (MIR, 1936-1939) revealing the role of MIR in the propaganda campaign that followed the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain. The church and fascism, against which the "Spanish people" fought, appeared at the exhibition as the main enemies of both the Spanish and the Soviet peoples. The author relied primarily on the unique photographs and plate negatives stored in the collections of the MIR, which give a complete view of the exhibition, as well as on labels, partly preserved in the museum’s archive.