Sergey Dmitriyevich Merkurov

Sergey Dmitriyevich Merkurov was a Soviet sculptor-monumentalist of Greek-Armenian descent. He was a People's Artist of the USSR in visual arts, an academic at the Soviet Academy of Arts, and director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts from 1944 to 1949. Merkurov was considered the greatest Soviet master of post-mortem masks. He was the sculptor of the three biggest monuments of Joseph Stalin in the USSR.