The article offers a view on Stalinism as a phenomenon of European history and culture, continuing its “axial” tendencies and acquiring specificity in the conditions and circumstances of a certain historical time and cultural space. Stalinism is seen as the era of the early classic of the Soviet. The foundations of the Soviet were laid by Stalin in the course of radical transformations (collectivization, industrialization, and the cultural revolution), which took place in our country in the 1930s. The authors substantiate the position that the Soviet as a cultural and historical type, structurally and semantically determining the fundamental structure of society, the matrix of its political, economic and social systems, takes root in history and gains the opportunity for mass reproduction and development due to the emergence of homo soveticus. This is a new human type, formed on the basis of the theistic myth of Adam, created by the Russian intelligentsia in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries and entrenched in the Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period. The authors also note that modern Russian society is undergoing the transformation of the Soviet. Its paths and results extensively depend on whether Russian science will be able to overcome Stalin’s legacy in the field of social cognition - the basic provisions of historical materialism underlying the discourse that largely predetermines the methodological attitudes and semantics of modern philosophical and political thinking.