Augusta Stylianou Gallery
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Sculptures
Soviet War Memorial, Berlin
Yevgeny Viktorovich Vuchetich
The Soviet War Memorial (sometimes translated as the Soviet Cenotaph), is a vast war memorial and military cemetery in Berlin's Treptower Park. It was built to the design of the Soviet architect Yakov Belopolsky to commemorate 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945. It opened four years after the war ended on May 8, 1949, and served as the central war memorial of East Germany.
The monument should not be confused with the Soviet War Memorial (Tiergarten), built in 1945 in the Tiergarten district of what would later become West Berlin, or the Soviet War Memorial (Schönholzer Heide), in Berlin's Pankow district.
Layout
The focus of the ensemble is a monument by Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich: a 12-m tall statue of a Soviet soldier with a sword holding a German child, standing over a broken swastika.
Before the monument is a central area lined on both sides by 16 stone sarcophagi, one for each of the 16 Soviet Republics (in 1940-1956 then up to the reorganization of the Karelo-Finnish SSR into the Karelian ASSR there were 16 "union republics") with relief carvings of military scenes and quotations from Joseph Stalin, on one side in Russian, on the other side the same text in German. The area is the final resting place for some 5000 soldiers of the Red Army.
At the opposite end of the central area from the statue is a portal consisting of a pair of stylized Soviet flags built of red granite. These are flanked by two statues of kneeling soldiers.
Beyond the flag monuments is a further sculpture, along the axis formed by the soldier monument, the main area, and the flags, is another figure, of the Motherland weeping at the loss of her sons.
In recent years, the ensemble has undergone a thorough renovation. In 2003 the main statue was removed and sent to a workshop on the island of Rügen for refurbishment. It was replaced on May 4, 2004.
From Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
