In 1965, the publishing house of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. issued a short circulation of the monograph by Sh. ‘Goya against the Papacy and Inquisition’. It immediately became a bibliographic rarity. An interest of Sh. to that artist arose in the mid-1930s, when he participated in organization of the exhibitions ‘Inquisition’ (later transformed under his leadership into the department ‘History of the Papacy and Inquisition’ in the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism) and ‘Revolutionary Spain in the Fight against Fascism’, where he used etchings by Francisco Goya. The book was written by the 125th anniversary of the artist's death. In it Sh. spoke about the life and work of the great educator and humanist, whose legacy reflected the tragic fate of Spanish people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The value of the study is thanks to the comments on the etchings of the series ‘Caprichos’ and ‘Proverbios’ (Disparates). Sh. managed to reveal the secrets of the ‘encrypted’ etchings. A deep knowledge of the folklore sources of Goya's works made it possible to clarify the mysteriousness of their plots, to show a connection between the artist's ‘otherworldly nightmares’ and popular anti-clericalism.