The story of the young Leningrad writer L.N. Rakhmanov “Basil”, which was published in 1933, told about the tragic fate of a serf who participated in the construction of St. Isaac’s cathedral. By the end of the 1930s the story which was published for the first time at the period of the formation of the State Anti-Religious Museum and had many reprints after that, was included in the list of books recommended for reading for museum’s visitors. The subject of this article is establishing a connection between interpretation of the history of the cathedral, proposed by L.N. Rakhmanov, and some changes in the profile of the State Anti-Religious Museum which took place in the 1930s. The author, referred to the documents of 6 St. Petersburg archives, reconstructed the stages of the writer’s work on the text of the book and the image of St. Isaac’s Cathedral created on its pages, which was in demand by the new administration of the State Anti-Religious Museum in the mid-1930s. During this period, the role of the League of Militant Atheists, as a result of whose persistent initiative the museum had been opened, noticeably decreased, and party and state leaders chose a course towards patriotization of ideology. These factors led to the factual transformation of the museum’s profile. The new image of the cathedral as a monument of labor was close to that formed by L.N. Rakhmanov, and in 1939 the museum’s editions both discursively and verbatim echoed to the story “Basil”.