TARAS FRANKO AS THE «UNRELIABLE» DIRECTOR OF HIS FATHER’S IDEOLOGICAL MUSEUM

The article deals with the activities of T. Franko as the director of the Ivan Franko Museum in Lviv from 1947 to 1949, a period characterized by intensified Soviet ideological propaganda and the active promotion of Franko’s cult as «Kamenyar» and a revolutionary writer. On the basis of archival sources, the author identifies the main reasons for the appointment of T. Franko as director, reveals the son’s internal conflict between the need to arrange a pro-Soviet exposition and the rejection of Soviet stamps and paradigms, distortions and distortions of his father’s image. The conditions of constant ideological pressure from the Soviet authorities on the work of the director and museum staff, the atmosphere of denunciation and espionage are also pointed out. The role of T. Franko in establishing the museumʼs research work, organizing expeditions to Drohobych region, enriching the museumʼs collections with valuable exhibits, expanding the library, establishing the first monument to I. Franko in Ukraine by H. Pyvovarov, writing a number of important factual memoir articles and essays, as well as creating a gallery of paintings about the writer, has been clarified. It was found that the reason for T. Franko’s dismissal from his position at the museum was a series of «political» and «bourgeois-nationalist errors», which actually revealed his unwillingness to falsify his father’s biography and distort his true image in favor of the Soviet system. After his dismissal, the true achievements of T. Franko as the director of his father’s museum were either hidden (his articles, memoirs, and paintings were preserved in the museum’s collections) or attributed to others (the initiative to establish the first monument to I. Franko was unjustly claimed by the museum's next director, I. Kiyashko). The punishment for the «disobedient» son was his forced-voluntary relocation from Lviv to Kyiv in the summer of 1950. Keywords: Taras Franko, ideological propaganda, Soviet system, Ivan Franko Museum, totalitarianism.