THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Even by the typically monumental standards of Soviet-era memorials, “The Motherland Calls” is an impressive sight. Towering seventeen stories above the Russian city of Volgograd, the monolithic statue depicting a windswept woman holding aloft a sword is a striking combination of neoclassical styling and Stalinist kitsch. A symbolic representation of Soviet victory over Nazi invaders, the figure intentionally recalls the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” Like that ancient masterpiece, the Soviet composition communicates dynamism and strength.  A closer inspection of “The Motherland Calls,” however, reveals at least one important difference. Cast entirely out of reinforced concrete,  the dull, grey surface (interrupted here and there by cracks and the rust marks caused from embedded rebar) suggests none of the solidity and timelessness of the marble Greek statute.

The incredible mass of the statue is difficult to comprehend unless seen in person. From its plinth to the top of the figure’s head, “The Motherland Calls” measures 170 feet. Its highest point (the tip of the sword) is located nearly 300 feet in the air. Each of the two shawl pieces extruding wing-like from the figure’s back exceeds the length of an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer. Both weigh close to 250 tons. The composition as a whole tips the scales at 8,000 tons. Not surprisingly, “The Motherland Calls” was the world’s largest statue at the time of its public dedication on October 15, 1967. [For a better view, click on the image to the right. Note the adults standing alongside the statue's base.]

“The Motherland Calls” is not a stand-alone monument. Rather, it is the focal point of a vast memorial complex covering 1.3 square miles. The complex is located on Mamaev Kurgan (“Hill of Mamai”), the former epicenter of the Battle of Stalingrad (as the city was then known). It was here that the fate of Europe was determined in 1942-43. The hill was stormed by the Germans in mid-September 1942 only to be recaptured by the Red Army several days later. It subsequently changed hands several times before the encirclement and destruction of the Nazi forces was completed.

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In the decades that followed 1945, the Battle of Stalingrad emerged as the centerpiece of a state-sponsored cult dedicated to the USSR’s victory over German Fascism. Intended to honor the tens of millions of soldiers and civilians who lost their lives in the “Great Patriotic War,” the war cult also served as a political prop for Communist party officials. During the 1950s and 1960s tens of thousands of monuments were commissioned to memorialize Soviet heroes and victories. These provided backdrops for countless ceremonies aimed at uniting citizens behind an official history of collective suffering and sacrifice that portrayed the party and its officials as essential to victory.

The war cult’s high water mark came in 1967 – the year in which the Communist party celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. With memories of “Great October” receding into the past, Soviet leaders turned to the more recent conflict to generate continuing support for the regime. As Nina Tumarkin explained in The Living and the Dead, the war had it all: “drama, violence, martyrdom, and a chic global status”; everything, in short, that made for great public theater.¹ Indeed, some 50,000 citizens turned out for the year’s signature event: the public dedication of the monument on Mamaev Kurgan. The political importance of the past to the present was clearly displayed during the memorial’s opening ceremony. In his keynote speech marking the occasion, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed the mammoth monument proof of the USSR’s post-war resurgence. The statue, he noted, was a symbol “of the people’s infinite love of the Motherland and its close, unshakable solidarity with the Communist party.” Evgenii Vuchetich, the establishment sculptor who conceived “The Motherland Calls,” was celebrated for the patriotism and pathos of his design. Contemporary newspaper reports went so far as to compare the laborers who had constructed the colossus to the soldiers who had engaged the Fascist invaders during the height of the conflict.

Like the official version of the Great Patriotic War, the official story of the monument’s construction was largely a myth. Its completion was less a military campaign than a comedy of errors. First approved in 1958, the memorial was originally intended to open in 1962 (in time to mark the twentieth anniversary of the battle it commemorates). However, bureaucratic incompetence, material shortages, and technical constraints repeatedly delayed its completion. Cost overruns also plagued the project. Initially budgeted at 39.5 million rubles, the final tab for memorial approached twice that amount. The decision to cast “The Motherland Calls” out of reinforced concrete was itself a concession to the project’s rapidly rising costs. (Vuchetich’s original design called for a 100-foot tall marble statue.) The country’s political leadership did little to help matters. In the fall of 1961, with work set to begin on the statue, Nikita Khrushchev (then, the party’s First Secretary) abruptly decreed that the height of the Motherland be increased to 170 feet. He wanted the USSR’s tallest monument to exceed the American Statue of Liberty.²

Despite the chaotic circumstances behind its construction, the final results are impressive. Last year, a nationwide poll conducted by Russian on-line media outlets proclaimed “The Motherland Calls” one of the “Seven Wonders of Russia.” Anyone who has visited Volgograd would be hard-pressed to disagree.

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Although the USSR disintegrated in 1991, both the war cult and its monuments remain. Today, however, official commemorations of the Great Patriotic War typically downplay connections to the Soviet past. In this year’s Victory Day speech from Moscow’s Red Square, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev avoided any mention of the now defunct Union. His use of the term “Motherland” in place of references to the USSR underscored the increasing efforts of Russian officials to lay claim to the war as a (mostly) Russian triumph. Such rhetoric is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a broader campaign to generate patriotic support for the government through appeals to World War II-era glories.

Readers of The Russian Front are well aware that a few weeks back President Medvedev convened a new commission intended to combat “falsehoods” regarding Russia’s contributions to the Great Patriotic War. As Dave Stone has noted, the commission’s twenty-eight members include current military officers, bureaucrats, politicians, and intelligence agents, but only three actual historians (none of whom belong to institutions free from state oversight). Nearly all of the commission’s participants are known for their strong support of the Medvedev-Putin administration and for holding staunchly nationalist views. Two members have been banned from entering neighboring Ukraine for advocating the transfer of the Crimean region to the Russian Federation.³

As the state fiddles with commissions defending past martial glories, Russia is presently besieged by numerous socio-economic problems. The world economic downturn this past winter hit the country’s export-dependent petro-economy hard. Russia’s short-term economic situation appears to have stabilized for the time being, but the state’s on-going military build-up and continuing over investment in the oil and gas industries (at the expense of education, health care, social services, and other “human-capital” sectors) are doing nothing to address critical long-term issues. Plummeting birth rates, rampant infectious diseases (especially among the nation’s prison population), and the seemingly eternal scourge of widespread chronic alcoholism have produced a “de-population bomb” that threatens to implode, bringing demographic collapse to the Eurasian landmass. Clearly, the energy being spent by state officials defending Russia’s World War II legacy could be better spent elsewhere.

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Ironically, the convocation of the President’s “truth commission” came close on the heels of troubling news concerning the country’s most prominent monument to the Great Patriotic War. In mid-April, reports from Volgograd indicated that “The Motherland Calls” is at serious risk. The accumulation of groundwater atop Mamaev Kurgan has caused the mammoth structure’s foundation to shift. At present, the statue is leaning more than eight inches off-center. The situation is getting worse. Unless major (and expensive) structural repairs are made soon, “The Motherland Calls” is in danger of catastrophic collapse.

What Russian news agencies did not report is an even greater irony. This precise problem now facing “The Motherland Calls” was forecast more than four decades ago – even before the statue was erected. In the late summer of 1964, facing continuing delays and confusion on the construction site, exasperated Party officials transferred control of the ongoing project to Nikolai Niktin. The USSR’s most celebrated structural engineer, Nikitin had earned his well-deserved reputation directing a series of massive construction projects during the 1940s and 1950s. (At the time he was summoned to Volgograd in 1964, he was overseeing work on what would become for near four decades world’s largest free-standing structure: Moscow’s Ostankino Television Tower.) Almost immediately, Nikitin informed state officials that the site atop Mamaev Kurgan had not been properly prepared in advance of the decision to pour the statue’s fifty-two ft deep reinforced concrete foundation. Moreover, First Secretary Khrushchev’s subsequent decree nearly doubling the statue’s size failed to take into account the effects of greatly added weight on the site. Specifically, Nikitin warned that if proper steps were not taken to address the issue of groundwater accumulation on the hill, the long-term stability of the monument could not be guaranteed.

Owing to the short-sightedness and haste of Soviet officials more than forty years ago, “The Motherland Calls” is today threatened by collapse. Unless Russia’s political leaders set aside their fixation with past martial glories and devote full effort to repairing their country’s fractured foundation, the same may be true of the Motherland itself.

1. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 132. [↩]
2. Scott W. Palmer, “How Memory was Made: The Construction of the Memorial to the Heroes of the Stalingrad Battle,” The Russian Review 68:3 (July 2009): 373-407 [↩]
3. Pavel Felgenhauer, “Medvedev Forms a Commission to Protect Russian History,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, 6:98 (May 21, 2009). [↩]

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