The Attitude towards Man in the Official Soviet Political Culture of the Late 1920s – Early 1950s: The Construction of a Hero and the Mobilization of the Masses.

The article examines the content of the political culture of the Stalin era, which was determined by the contradiction between the declared ideal of a person and the actual attitude to the mass individual. The purpose of the study is to present the direction, methods, mechanisms, and functions of constructing such an ideal (a hero as a model for identification) in art, culture, and state cultural policy aimed at producing a mass individual as a conscious communist and in fact cheap military or labor force. The research methodology is based on the sociology of knowledge by P. Berger and T. Luckmann, analyzing the social correlation of knowledge and social reality, meaning, and objectivity. The author of the article summarizes the Soviet art construction principles that make up the canon of socialist realism. Fiction helps to reveal the hidden meaning of political culture as a whole: cultivating a hero means devaluing an ordinary individual, contributing to its effective use for any purpose. The study found that the result of the Stalinist stage of the cultural revolution was the transformation of the official, state political culture into a social constructor producing heroes in order to educate the Soviet man. Such a type of mass individual possesses a set of moral and political qualities that the party and the state need - communist consciousness, discipline, collectivity, patriotism, the ability to self-sacrifice, etc. However, while the functioning of the Stalinist political culture as a constructor, everyday reality, conditions of existence, needs, and interests of the mass individual were not taken into account, the ambivalent Soviet man became its actual end product being a heritage that retains a certain significance in today's Russia.