Volgograd's Rodina-Mat'

Hi Friends,

July 4 saw me head down south to Volgograd - formerly Stalingrad - the scene of one of the twentieth-century's most important and bloody battles. The city was almost completely obliterated and was reconstructed immediately following the war. The highest part of the city, Mamaev Kurgan, was the most strategically important and after the war was turned into a huge park and memorial complex. Perched on the very peak of the hill is the statue, Rodina-Mat' Zovet, (or the Motherland Calls), which forms the culmination of a series of reflecting pools, other monuments, the Eternal Flame, and a series of ramps and staircases. It might all seem over the top but it is all quite fitting given the monumentality of the battle and the losses. To remind you, it was here where the Soviets started turning back the Nazis, and almost 2 million people died. This truly is a humbling place to visit and completely jaw dropping.

If you've been to the former Soviet Union and seen any of the myriad WWII statues, you're often left wondering why they must all be uniformly grandiose and somber. Somehow they fail to impress. Whether its their distance from the actual battle, your knowledge of their ubiquity, or that the Almaty statue likely resembles the Yakutsk statue, or that they kind of look like every other Soviet statue....one is left ruminating how the Soviet Union was so often a place of uniformity, even among its monstrosities. But this is totally different. First, the statues are moving and quite unlike any other Soviet sculptures I've seen in terms of real pathos and creativity, even within a restrained vocabulary. And second, even if they strike that somber, grandiose note, it's utterly fitting here. It's the only correct note. So let's salute a little known statue, and its little known artist, E. V. Vuchetich, and its main engineer, V.N. Nikitin. When it was completed in 1967 it was the world's tallest statue at 67m.

More soon to come from the Volga.