Eliẓaveta Efimova on Berlin’s impressive trio of Soviet memorials…
Two roads lead to Treptower Park’s Soviet War memorial—Puschkinallee or Straße am Treptower Park—both of which pass through entrances marked by magnificent stone arches. The paths converge at the three-meter-high statue of Mother Russia mourning her fallen sons during World War II: 80,000 soldiers died fighting for Berlin, and 7,000 of them rest below the shade of plane and sycamore trees in the memorial’s cemetery.
From this statue, a small alley atmospherically lined with weeping willows leads to the main memorial: a vast rectangular space heralded by immense granite pedestals decorated with the coat of arms of the Soviet Union and flanked by statues of grieving soldiers. A wide stone staircase leads down to the main grounds, which are hidden from the park’s normal leisure visitors by uniform ranks of trees.
These immaculately landscaped grounds, which opened on May 8th 1949, exactly four years after the end of the war, were built on a former sports pitch. They’re so vast that the memorial seems to absorb the sounds of speech, leaving only the chirping of birds and the gentle rustling of leaves in the air, as if forcing visitors to observe a fragile silence for those commemorated here, as well as all the others who didn’t get out of the war alive, and those whose loved ones never returned.
On either side of the memorial, sixteen stone sarcophagi are erected in honour of each of the republics of the Soviet Union that existed at that time; in 1956 the Republic of Karelia separated from the USSR, leaving only fifteen until the total collapse of the union. The surface of the sarcophagi are decorated with reliefs depicting war scenes as well as Stalin quotes on either side carved in gold in German and Russian.
At the far edge of the memorial is an even larger (13-meter) monument, «Воин-Освободитель» (“Warrior Liberator”) by Yevgeny Vuchetich, which stands proudly on the wreckage of a swastika. The soldier holds a lowered sword in one hand, and with the other holds a young German child he has saved; this was supposedly modelled on Red Army sergeant of guards Nikolai Masalov, who risked his life to rescue a local three-year old whose mother had disappeared.
This monument is in fact the final part of a triptych whose other two parts are in Russia: «Тыл — фронту» (“Rear to the Front”) by Lev Golovnitsky and Yakov Belopolsky can be found in Magnitogorsk, and «Родина-мать зовёт!» (“Motherland Calls!”) sits on the Mamaev Kurgan in Volgograd (and is also by Vuchetich). Th…