Monument to the Victims of Political Repression
The past century has become a century of contradictions for us; our grandfathers and grandmothers experienced both great achievements and incredible suffering. It is no coincidence that in St. Petersburg, the intellectual center of the era of Stalin’s concentration camps, on Robespierre Avenue, there is a monument to the victims of political repression, donated by the sculptor M.M. Shamyakin to his hometown in April 1995.
Address:
St. Petersburg, emb. Robespierre
The memorial was designed by architects V.B.
Bukhaeva, A.N. Vasilyeva. Bronze castings for the sculptures were made in America and delivered to St. Petersburg, granite parts were made at Vozrozhdenie JSC. The location was chosen symbolically, because on the other side of the Neva is the Kresty prison, where political prisoners were languished in anticipation of death and executed. The work represents two sphinxes mounted on granite pedestals, at a distance of several meters, facing each other. Their face is divided in two vertically. The part facing the “Crosses” has the appearance of a rotted skull, personifying the lethality of the Stalinist regime. There is no skin on this side of the face, as if symbolizing attempts to erase even the memory of people from history. The other part is made in the form of a living person, a person who exists in ignorance, thereby living unaware of the suffering of the other half of the Russian people. The authors showed the extremes of that time: freedom - death, ignorance - life, economic progress - human sacrifice. The body of the sphinxes is thin, with protruding ribs, which also shows the state of the people in the 30s of the 19th century. Between the sphinxes there is a composition of four blocks of pink granite, with an opening crossed by a cross and reminiscent of a prison window. On granite pedestals, there are copper tablets, as if encircling the sphinxes, on which lines are carved from the works of Vysotsky, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and other authors. Of course, the symbolism of the sphinxes is immeasurably great, but the main idea is to perpetuate the memory of the innocently killed.
Bukhaeva, A.N. Vasilyeva. Bronze castings for the sculptures were made in America and delivered to St. Petersburg, granite parts were made at Vozrozhdenie JSC. The location was chosen symbolically, because on the other side of the Neva is the Kresty prison, where political prisoners were languished in anticipation of death and executed. The work represents two sphinxes mounted on granite pedestals, at a distance of several meters, facing each other. Their face is divided in two vertically. The part facing the “Crosses” has the appearance of a rotted skull, personifying the lethality of the Stalinist regime. There is no skin on this side of the face, as if symbolizing attempts to erase even the memory of people from history. The other part is made in the form of a living person, a person who exists in ignorance, thereby living unaware of the suffering of the other half of the Russian people. The authors showed the extremes of that time: freedom - death, ignorance - life, economic progress - human sacrifice. The body of the sphinxes is thin, with protruding ribs, which also shows the state of the people in the 30s of the 19th century. Between the sphinxes there is a composition of four blocks of pink granite, with an opening crossed by a cross and reminiscent of a prison window. On granite pedestals, there are copper tablets, as if encircling the sphinxes, on which lines are carved from the works of Vysotsky, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and other authors. Of course, the symbolism of the sphinxes is immeasurably great, but the main idea is to perpetuate the memory of the innocently killed.
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