1967, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution, is considered by many historians and politicians as a peak of might and power of the Soviet nation and the triumph of priority of socialistic regime over capitalist system and all other political and state systems in the world. It is opinion of many analysts that the subsequent years were the period of a slow recession and a ground lost of socialism and capitalism under pressure of externals and internals, military and political conflicts, social and public shakes, which led ultimately to crisis and break-up of the social system. Yet even at that time, in the anniversary year of 1967, an attentive person feeling the pulse of his country could notice by his ear and eye those occasionally hardly perceptible strokes, nuances and rough drafts, which in two decades turned into terrible rockslides and break-ups that smashed the seemingly stable system deliberate for years…

Leonid Lazarev met the day of November 7, 1967 on the Red Square and ended it in the late evening, without putting camera out of his hands. He shot several dozens of photographic films while going about the festive Moscow. He paid attention to everything interesting in the view of the artist — faces, street sketches, processions, buildings, illumination, attire of the squares and the streets, fixing and drawing up the many-sided capital image formed by hundreds of stopped moments, just like a mosaic picture. For the album-book under the symbolic name «Apotheosis» he picked out about 80 frames carrying multi-aspect information about that day, most of which have besides the merely graphic the accessory decision, the psychologically sensible implication, that is more important than the photographically decorative (a very interesting in itself) style of the photograph.

Each photograph has its poetical or ironical name laying stress on the author?s attitude to what is going on and revealing viewpoint of the photo-artist, his aesthetic and civic stance to onlookers.