The Monument to the Victims of Political Repressions in Saint Petersburg is dedicated to the millions of people who suffered from state terror in the USSR. It is located in front of the descent to the water on the Voskresenskaya Embankment of the Neva River, separating it from the legendary “Kresty” prison, where many political prisoners were held. The central element of the monument is the majestic and tragic sculpture by Shemyakin – his “metaphysical sphinxes” with beautiful and terrifying half-faces of young women. Created in the Art Nouveau style, they have a distinctive feature — their faces are divided vertically into two halves. Facing the residential buildings on the embankment, the sphinxes show the profiles of youthful female faces, while towards the “Kresty” prison on the opposite bank, they reveal frightening faces corroded by the decay of death, symbolizing terror. This symbolizes the tragic division of the people during the Soviet years. Around the plinths of the sculptures are plaques with texts dedicated to Soviet repressions, written by famous writers and dissidents. Between the sphinxes is a structure made of granite blocks in the shape of an early Christian cross with a prison window and a crown of thorns made of barbed wire.

The verses written in 1916 by Mandelstam, who perished in the Gulag in 1938, sound like a chilling prophecy:

In the vast room, the heavy Neva
And blue blood flows from granite.

“I was struck by their appearance,” said Likhachyov at the monument’s unveiling, “each sphinx on Robespierre Embankment has a face half human, half death. And this is a reminder of the countless victims whose groans were never heard.”

I would like to name them all,
But the lists were taken away, and there is nowhere to find out.

Anna Akhmatova

Shemyakin’s choice of sphinx sculptures was determined not only by the desire to immortalize the memory of innocent victims but also by his method of metaphysical transformation, in this case of the great heritage of Egypt. The frozen faces of pharaohs, majestic in solemn calm and immortal grandeur, flank the descent to the Neva near the Academy of Arts and served as the basis for creating the modern sphinxes. They form a striking dissonance with the faces of death and the inscriptions on the pedestals dedicated to the memory of known and unknown citizens who perished in Soviet prisons.

The central element of the monument to the victims of political repressions is a pair of mirror-symmetrical bronze sculptures of “metaphysical sphinxes,” created by artist Mikhail Shemyakin. They represent somewhat deformed figures of the legendary monsters of the Ancient World, having the body of a lion and the head and chest of a woman. The sphinxes lie on two granite pedestals with their heads raised. Their bodies are thin, ribs visible on the animal torsos, their slender necks exaggeratedly and anxiously stretched, and below, at the junction of the lion and human parts, are expressive female breasts. The heads of the sphinxes are crowned with stylized ancient Egyptian nemes headdresses and pschent crowns. The main feature of Shemyakin’s monsters is their faces: they are divided vertically into two halves. Facing the residential buildings on the embankment, the sphinxes show profiles of young female faces, while towards the Neva and the “Kresty” prison on the opposite bank, they reveal exposed skulls. Thus, one side is perceived as alive, beautiful, with sensually rising ribs, and the other as dead, decaying, with bones of the skeleton visible through the corpse’s body.

Mikhail Shemyakin described the symbolic meaning of the sculptures as follows: “…The faces of the sphinxes embody the cruel regime… This reflects the life of the country — one half lived in ignorance, the others died, unknown for what.” As critic Tatyana Voltskaya noted, “the two-faced images symbolize life and death, freedom and slavery, as well as the duality of human nature, capable both of rising to spiritual heights and descending to mass murders and the destruction of entire peoples.” Poet and critic Viktor Krivulin remarked that the sphinxes represent “the boundary between the living and the dead.” Philologist and art historian Dmitry Likhachyov saw in the sculptures “the face of an era,” whose dead side symbolizes repressions and their victims, and the living side — secret resistance to them, courage, and hopes of Soviet dissidents. He interpreted the pairing of figures as a symbol of the split in Russian society, civil confrontation and war, the division of Rus’ into “ordinary” and “oprichnina.” Mikhail Shemyakin, who often addressed the theme of a “cosmically all-encompassing masquerade” and the mask of death as its central component in his work, according to Viktor Krivulin, brought into the monument “elements of a kind of new tragic travesty and seemingly exposed the bloody-carnival basis of the very idea of tyrannical power, the subconscious nature of dictatorship, which put most of Russia on the edge of life and death.” Art historian Mikhail Zolotonosov noted the plastic expressiveness and meaningfulness of the sphinx sculptures, seeing in them “the concept of death, lustfully and greedily attacking man, longing for him, full of eternal thirst for life.” Researcher Alexander Etkind noted that the anthropo-zoomorphic images of Shemyakin’s sphinxes are a rare example of an attempt to concretize the image in the poor Russian iconography of monuments to victims of political repressions. At the same time, he considered that this monument is a metaphor of passive suffering, inability to resist evil and terror, which seem inevitable when looking at the monsters, like death itself, and that it is very generalized and does not provide an understanding of the specific history of repressions: resistance, camp uprisings, torture, cruelty, violence, ideological background, and so on.

The “metaphysical sphinxes” are reinterpreted images of their ancient Egyptian Theban counterparts, installed on the University Embankment in Saint Petersburg. In Ancient Egypt, such sculptures were part of the cult of the king-pharaoh, who was revered as a god and possessed unlimited power. At the same time, they were attributed mystical protective functions. Art historians see in the image of the sphinx a parallel with Soviet Russia with its totalitarian dictatorship, personality cults of Lenin (including the pyramid with the mummy and the proclamation of him as “eternally alive”), Stalin and Brezhnev, mass slave labor, and repressions.

At the same time, Shemyakin’s sphinx iconography also includes the classical interpretation. According to Ancient Greek myths, the monster in the form of a half-woman, half-lion was sent by the gods as punishment to the inhabitants of Thebes in Boeotia. The sphinx ambushed travelers, posed cunning riddles, and killed all who could not solve them. Thus, she destroyed many people. The riddle was solved only by Oedipus, after which the monster, disappointed, threw herself off a cliff, and the hero became king of Thebes but opened the way to his tragic fate. The classical image of the sphinx, inherited by modern art, found its reflection in the work of Alexander Blok. In the poem “The Scythians,” written after the communist revolution, the poet proclaims:

Russia is a Sphinx! Rejoicing and mourning,

And shedding black blood,

She looks, looks, looks at you

With both hatred and love!..”

Through the prism of this iconography, critics see in Shemyakin’s sphinxes a metaphor of a state that destroys people.

Art historian Dmitry Likhachyov characterized Shemyakin’s sphinxes as a continuation of the “road of sphinxes” on the banks of the Neva in Saint Petersburg. In his opinion, it begins with the sphinxes on the University Embankment, located opposite Senate Square, where the Decembrist Uprising took place in 1825, which became a harbinger of the future collapse of the empire. The chain continues with the Chinese Shi-tzu statues placed near the last Romanov palace after the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905–1907 Revolution (these events were the prelude to the communist revolution). The third pair is located on Kamenny Island, near buildings serving the Soviet party elite, marking the tragedy of Soviet Russia. Shemyakin’s sphinxes, dedicated to the victims of repressions and installed opposite the dreadful “Kresty” prison, close this tragic path. According to Likhachyov, the monument “both represents its era and comprehends it in a historical perspective.”

The sphinx figures are life-sized. The height of the sculpture is 1.5 meters, and the dimensions of its pedestal are 2.3 × 0.8 × 1.8 meters. According to Viktor Krivulin, this figure size, which somewhat does not correspond to the scale of the embankment, was a deliberate gesture rejecting megalomania and gigantomania in favor of humanizing the monument’s image.

The architectural design of the monument was done by Vyacheslav Bukhaev and Anatoly Vasilyev. The memorial is located in front of the descent to the water on the Voskresenskaya Embankment of the Neva. The sculptures on the pedestals stand slightly away from its granite parapet. The distance between the sphinxes facing each other is fifteen meters. In the middle of the embankment parapet is a structure made of four granite blocks, arranged to form the shape of an early Christian cross with a small hole in the center. This stylized prison window is covered by a grille in the form of a thin iron cross. Through it, the viewer’s gaze focuses on the “Kresty” prison located on the opposite bank of the Neva. The upper block bears the inscription: “To the victims of political repressions.” A wreath of barbed wire, a kind of crown of thorns, is attached to the lower block. A fifth block is placed against the parapet below it, on which lies a closed book (either the Soviet Criminal Code or a list of victims). Critics perceive this structure as a kind of allegory of prison and faith. Between the sphinxes and the embankment, a cross made of cobblestones is laid out, oriented with its ends toward the three elements of the monument’s composition. The number of stones corresponds, according to the authors’ idea, to the number of repressed people in the USSR — each stone represents 10,000 victims. Researcher Alexander Etkind notes that the symbolism of the cross is one of the most frequently encountered in the iconography of monuments to victims of political repressions in Russia: such a language allows expressing grief for the dead (although it does not reveal the circumstances of death and crimes).

The location of the monument has important symbolic significance. Directly opposite it, across the Neva, opens a large panorama of the red-brick buildings of the “Kresty” prison complex. It naturally becomes part of the memorial’s composition as a background and another very expressive symbol of repressions. The “Kresty” prison became legendary due to the numerous political prisoners held there during Soviet times. It is described in Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem,” dedicated to Stalinist repressions. Also nearby (Liteyny Prospekt, 4) is the “Big House,” built in the early 1930s as the residence of the authorities responsible for terror, the NKVD-KGB (now occupied by their successor, the FSB). Political prisoners were tortured and killed there. According to urban legend, the blood of those killed in the basements of this building flowed through sewer pipes into the Neva, coloring the river water red. In the late 1980s, a large amount of information about political repressions became public, but the burial sites of their victims remained a secret. For this reason, starting in 1988, citizens began to release flowers into the water from the pier at the intersection of Chernyshevsky Prospekt, located between the “Big House” and the “Kresty” prison, on the first Saturday of June in memory of the killed whose graves are unknown.

Across the street from the monument, in the square between houses 12 and 14 on the embankment, stands the Anna Akhmatova monument, opened in 2006. Created according to the poetess’s “literary will” given in “Requiem,” it is a kind of continuation of the memorial to the victims of political repressions.

The embankment on which it stands was once named after Robespierre, which can be seen as a reference to the history of state terror of another revolution — the Great French Revolution.

Around the bronze plinths of Shemyakin’s sphinxes, a series of copper plaques are attached, engraved with lines from the works of Varlam Shalamov, Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Zabolotsky, Daniil Andreev, Dmitry Likhachyov, Joseph Brodsky, Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Vysotsky, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Andrei Sakharov. These texts form a kind of “anthology” of the monument on the theme of political repressions in the USSR, all created by people who were in one way or another victims of them and fought against them. According to many researchers, literature became the main monument to the history of state terror in Russia. These inscriptions are important because they reveal the semantic content of the memorial.

The texts for the monument were selected by Vyacheslav Bukhaev and Mikhail Yupp. Vladimir Bukovsky himself composed and sent his statement. Mikhail Shemyakin chose excerpts from Brodsky and Vysotsky.

On the eastern (“front”) face are two plaques. One is on the sculpture’s plinth, the other is inset into the granite pedestal:

An unhappy country is one where simple honesty is perceived at best as heroism, at worst as mental illness, for in such a country the earth will not yield bread. Woe to the people whose sense of dignity has dried up, for their children will be born deformed. And if there is not even one in that country to take upon himself the common sin, the wind will never again return to its circles. Vladimir Bukovsky, 1995;

Vladimir Bukovsky was a writer and one of the most famous human rights activists in the USSR. For his activities, he was repeatedly arrested, subjected to punitive psychiatry, and in 1976 was expelled from the country;

… I hope that, overcoming dangers, achieving great development in all areas of life, humanity will be able to preserve the human in man. Andrei Sakharov;

Andrei Sakharov was a famous theoretical physicist and simultaneously an “icon” and mouthpiece of the dissident movement in the USSR. For his criticism of Soviet power, he was repressed, including forced exile from Moscow;

On the southern face of the plinth are five plaques (left to right):

… I would like to name them all,
But the lists were taken away and there is nowhere to find out… And if they clamp my tortured mouth,
With which a hundred million people cry out… Then, because even in blessed death I fear
To forget the rumbling of black Marusya,
To forget how the loathsome one slammed the door
And the old woman howled like a wounded beast. And let the melted snow stream like tears from motionless and bronze eyelids,
And let the prison dove hoot in the distance,
And quietly ships sail along the Neva… Anna Akhmatova, 1935–1940 from “Requiem”;

Anna Akhmatova was one of the leading figures of the Silver Age. In 1921, her first husband Nikolay Gumilyov was executed. Later she herself was repressed, her husband Nikolay Punin and son Lev Gumilyov were repeatedly arrested, which is the subject of the poem “Requiem,” a landmark work about Stalinist terror;

… No! Not to the architects who create palaces under the sun and wind,
Domes and crowns, raising them in the blue horizon —
In the depths of a Russian prison I labor over a mysterious meter
Until the dawn’s edge in my dim-eyed window… Daniil Andreev, 1956 “Through Prison Walls”;

Daniil Andreev was a Soviet writer. In 1947, he was arrested on denunciation for the novel “Night Wanderers.” His wife and friends were also arrested. Andreev was accused of counterrevolutionary activity and plotting to assassinate Stalin. He spent 10 years in prison. During his imprisonment, Andreev created many of his works;

On the eastern face is one plaque:

… Petersburg! I still have addresses
Where I will find the voices of the dead… Osip Mandelstam. December 1930 from the poem “Leningrad”;

Osip Mandelstam was a poet of the Silver Age. In 1934, he was arrested for an anti-Stalin epigram “We live, not feeling the country beneath us” and exiled to Voronezh until 1937. In 1938, he was arrested again and died in custody;

On the northern face are three plaques (left to right):

A plaque with the signature of Raoul Wallenberg;

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. After the Soviet army occupied Budapest, he was detained by SMERSH and transferred to Moscow. He presumably died in a Soviet prison in July 1947;

… Therefore, all who drew deeper, experienced more fully — they are already in the grave, they will not tell. No one will ever tell the MAIN thing about these camps… Alexander Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”;

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet writer. In 1945, he was arrested for criticizing Stalin. He spent 8 years in prison and was then exiled. He wrote a number of works (including “The Gulag Archipelago”) that became milestones in the history of describing Soviet political repressions, bringing him worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. In 1974, he was arrested and expelled from the country;

All comrades fell asleep, only he alone does not sleep:
He is busy casting the bullet
That will separate me from the earth… Nikolay Gumilyov, 1917;

Nikolay Gumilyov was a poet of the Silver Age. In 1921, he was arrested on suspicion of participating in the “Tagantsev conspiracy” and soon executed.

On the western (“front”) face are two plaques. One is on the sculpture’s plinth, the other is inset into the granite pedestal:

Everything is taken into pipes, valves are closed, at night only they moan and whine that it is necessary… necessary to sprinkle salt on wounds to remember better — let them hurt! Vladimir Vysotsky;

Vladimir Vysotsky was a Soviet poet and actor. In 1968, during the persecution of the Taganka Theater, the authorities launched a campaign to discredit his work. Until 1981, no Soviet publisher released a book with Vysotsky’s texts;

The smell of larch was faint but clear, and no force in the world could drown, suffocate this smell, extinguish this green spring light and color. The faint persistent smell — it was the smell of the dead. On behalf of these dead, the larch dares to breathe, speak, and live. Varlam Shalamov “Kolyma Tales”;

Varlam Shalamov was a Soviet writer. He was close to the “left opposition,” for which he was arrested in 1929 and sentenced to 3 years. In 1937, he was arrested again, sentenced to five years in camps for “anti-Soviet propaganda,” and sent to Kolyma in Sevostlag. In the camp, Shalamov was sentenced to a new term of 9 years. After imprisonment, he created the cycle “Kolyma Tales,” which spread through samizdat and became a cult book about Soviet repressions;

On the southern face of the plinth are five plaques (left to right):

I can repeat what I said before: there is no fear in truth. Truth and fear are incompatible. Dmitry Likhachyov, 1987;

Dmitry Likhachyov was a Soviet philologist and art historian. In 1928, he was arrested on charges of “counterrevolutionary activity” for criticizing Soviet power and sentenced to 5 years. He served his sentence in the Solovki camp. Later, he built an academic career and was a moralist and ethicist;

January passed outside the prison windows, and I heard the singing of prisoners sounding in the brick choir of cells: “One of our brothers is free.”

You still hear the singing of prisoners and the silent footsteps of wardens, you yourself still sing silently: “Farewell, January.”

Turning my face to the window, you still drink warm air by gulps, and I again thoughtfully wander from interrogation to interrogation down the corridor

To that distant land where there is no longer January, February, or March. Joseph Brodsky, 1962;

Joseph Brodsky was a Soviet poet. In 1963, he was criticized by the authorities, then subjected to punitive psychiatry, arrested, convicted of “parasitism,” and sentenced to exile. In 1972, he was expelled from the country. In 1987, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature;

On the eastern face is one plaque:

… You can win this battle, but you will still lose this war. The war for democracy and Russia, the war that has already begun and in which justice will inevitably prevail… Yuri Galanskov, 1966;

Yuri Galanskov was a Soviet poet and dissident. In 1967, he was sentenced to 7 years for his activities. In 1972, he died in custody;

On the northern face are three plaques (left to right):

A plaque with holes stylized as bullet holes;

… There they went in their greatcoats — two unfortunate old Russian men, remembering their native huts and yearning for them from afar… no longer will their guards chase them, no longer will the camp convoy catch them, only the constellations of Magadan will sparkle, hanging over their heads… Nikolay Zabolotsky, 1947–1948;

Nikolay Zabolotsky was a Soviet poet. In 1938, he was arrested and then sentenced for “anti-Soviet propaganda,” spending 5 years in prison. His poem dedicated to the camps “Somewhere in the field near Magadan…” became widely known.

At the base of the eastern sphinx’s pedestal on the northern side is a plaque with the text: “Mikhail Shemyakin: Monument to the Victims of Political Repressions, installed 1995, Architects Vyacheslav Bukhaev, Anatoly Vasilyev.” This inscription is repeated in English. Mirrored in the same place on the western sphinx are two plaques: “Sculptor: Mikhail Shemyakin Architect: Vyacheslav Bukhaev Architect: Anatoly Vasilyev” and “JSC ‘Vozrozhdenie’.”

Critics highlight the monument on Voskresenskaya Embankment as one of the most famous and significant memorials to victims of political repressions in Russia, alongside the Solovki Stones in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the Mask of Sorrow in Magadan, and others.

The idea of creating a monument to the victims of political repressions appeared to Shemyakin long before perestroika. Initially, he wanted to create a large-scale composition of sphinxes five meters high surrounded by allegorical figures embodying, for example, the poet Alexander Blok and the simple-minded “man with a rifle” Nikolay Pogodin. But in the end, the artist abandoned this project. The “metaphysical sphinx” sculptures installed on the embankment were created by Shemyakin as early as 1992, as evidenced by the dates engraved on their plinths. Initially, they were dedicated to the Old Testament theme of the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, and the plinths bore Stars of David. Later, these sculptures formed the basis of the monument to the victims of repressions, with the stars at the base covered by the “anthology” plaques.

The initiative to create this memorial came from Mikhail Shemyakin and city authorities, particularly the governor of Saint Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. At the same time, the financial costs of creating and installing the monument were borne by the sculptor himself and business representatives. The monument was solemnly unveiled on April 28, 1995. At the opening ceremony, Governor Anatoly Sobchak, public figures Dmitry Likhachyov and Veniamin Ioffe spoke. The monument was also consecrated by an Orthodox priest.

From the very beginning, the creation of the monument sparked much controversy and criticism. City authorities were accused of arbitrariness, voluntarism, and favoritism in choosing the project and its author. Critics pointed out that the monument was created hastily, solely at the will of officials, bypassing the artistic council, open competition, and public discussion, including organizations of former political prisoners and the commission for restoring the rights of rehabilitated victims of repressions. Public activists reproached the authorities for refusing to implement a similar public project on Trinity Square. Critics spoke of the ambiguity and obscurity of the created image. Many wrote that the sphinxes embody “angels of death,” that they are more a monument to executioners and the authorities themselves than to the victims of repressions. Journalists also noted that the sphinxes, initially created as independent works of art, do not reveal the theme of the monument. The artist was accused of exploiting an important theme. Critics wrote about low artistic value, unsuccessful composition, scale, and location of the monument. There were even loud accusations that the cross in the middle of the composition was allegedly Catholic. The city’s chief architect almost disrupted the monument’s unveiling, pointing to allegedly poor granite finishing of the pedestals. A separate scandal arose because public organizations of former political prisoners were initially not invited to the opening ceremony.

The monument has repeatedly been subjected to vandalism and desecration. In the first days, some plaques were stolen from the sphinxes’ plinths. Later, vandals stole the wreath and then the bronze rose attached to the cross-shaped structure. Journalist Alexander Nevzorov smeared the sphinxes with white paint for his scandalous TV program. In April 2001, on Hitler’s birthday, the monument suffered significant damage: vandals knocked down the central part from the granite parapet of the embankment. Then the city governor Valentina Matviyenko allocated funds for the memorial’s repair. At the same time, the central part underwent some changes: a “crown of thorns” (instead of the lost rose), a dedicatory inscription, and a pedestal with a book appeared on it. In early 2015, the pedestal with the book was overturned, and the cobblestones were damaged. Specialists considered the communal services responsible for the incident, having accidentally damaged the monument during snow removal. In summer, the granite book was broken off and stolen from the central part of the memorial. In these cases, a major problem in reconstructing the monument was that it was never transferred to the city’s balance sheet, but in the end, it was repaired. In 2020, the theft of the book was repeated, but it was quickly restored.

Traditionally, on the day of remembrance of victims of political repressions, flowers are laid at the memorial. However, unlike the Solovki Stone on Trinity Square, the monument on Voskresenskaya Embankment rarely becomes the center of any actions.

Sources:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Victims_of_Political_Repressions_(Saint_Petersburg)

https://institutspb.ru/pdf/hearings/06-05_Godlevskaya.pdf

https://kudago.com/spb/place/pamyatnik-zhertvam-politicheskih-repressij-spb/

http://www.hellopiter.ru/Monument_to_victims_of_political_reprisals_photo.html