Mother Russia

The Third Reich and the Soviet Union lost more troops in six months at Stalingrad than the United States did throughout the entire war. Unlike the United States, whose citizens were mainly safe behind the great walls of the Atlantic and Pacific fronts, the fighting was so fierce at Stalingrad that Soviet able-bodied citizens were required to fight. Although the battle resulted in a near-disastrous defeat for the Soviet Union, they pushed back the fierce German advance, marking a critical turning point in World War II. To honor the heroes of Stalingrad, the Soviet Union built what stands as the tallest statue in Europe and the tallest statue of a woman in the world, The Motherland Calls.

As World War II ended, constructing a monument to the war dead of Stalingrad was not at the top of Josef Stalin's mind. In fact, for someone who was, for better or worse, the center of an extensive personality cult, very little was built to memorialize his greatest victory. Of course, statues of Lenin, Marx, and himself went up ceaselessly, but for the 20 million plus Soviets that died at the hands of the Nazis, there was shockingly little memorial. The proletariat needed to continue bringing the Soviets into the new era, and time and resources were far too limited to spend on building great monuments to the dead. Despite the enormity of the Battle of Stalingrad, it would take over 20 years after the conclusion of World War II for the Soviet Union to pay homage to the dead at Stalingrad. As noted by historian Lisa Kirschenbaum: "After 1947, when Victory Day became an ordinary work day, the state substantially curtailed the ritual spaces and times allotted for reflecting on both the heroes and the victims of the war. The cult of the war that emerged after Josef Stalin's death changed all this."

Upon Stalin's death on March 5th, 1953, memorials began to arise, some in honor, some in remembrance, but all in defiance of the now-deceased Soviet leader. Less than seven months after Stalin's death, plans for constructing a memorial cemetery and museum on the summit of Mamayev Kurgan to honor the heroes of Stalingrad began, resulting in the enormous statue, The Motherland Calls. Completed in 1967 and standing nearly 280 feet tall, it is a towering monument to the 1.2 million Soviet casualties. It remains the tallest statue in Europe and the tallest statue of a woman in the world.

Built as a propaganda piece, The Motherland Calls is part of the more prominent "Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad" complex. Mamayev Kurgan is not the site of a single monument but a complex of monuments to honor the Great Patriotic War. The project designer, Evgenii Viktorovich Vuchetich, was responsible for many post-World War II memorials in the Soviet sphere, including the Soviet Union's first major military memorial complex, a cemetery for the Red Army soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin. The project's construction was to last roughly four years at the estimated cost of 39.5 million rubles, or approximately 4.84 million U.S. dollars, in 2021. The project was not finished until 1967, at 68 million rubles, nearly twice the original estimate. The exact number of workers and man-hours spent on the project is unknown. Once completed, the entire complex covered 1.3 square miles, and the statue itself was impressive: Standing 287 feet tall (not including its base) and weighing 7900 tons, it is an architectural masterpiece.

The monument has suffered from structural issues since its construction—several renovations, including the replacement of its giant sword as well as efforts to improve its overall stability. The statue underwent significant renovations in 2017 at the cost of $35,000,000. One process was to resurface and weather-proof several surfaces to renovate the statue's appearance in time for the 75th Anniversary of the end of World War II. The monument serves as the centerpiece of a much larger memorial. There are nearly 35,000 Soviet war dead buried on the grounds of the statue and monument. One must walk through several other sections of the memorial to get to the base of the statue: The Ruined Walls Memorial, the Lake of Tears pool, the Hall of Military Glory (which, alongside the Kremlin, are the only places in Russia to host a permanent military guard of honor), and the square of grief, before reaching the base of the monument.

The meanings, themes, and propaganda behind The Motherland Calls are often as convoluted – if not even more so – than the story of its construction or the cost to repair and maintain the work. Vuchetich himself was a controversial figure. Part of the old orthodox guard of the Communist Party, he was often favored through patronage and contacts over artists who were often younger and more skilled than he. For a memorial supposed to represent the accurate idea of what it was to engage in proletarian sacrifice, its conception, construction, and reality are shrouded in nepotism, cronyism, and many of the same oligarchic issues plaguing Russia today. Were it not for the transparency of the Soviet Union that arose from both de-Stalinization and glasnost, these facts may have never come to light.

Despite any shortcomings of the lead designer, Vuchetich seemed determined to give the statue an international flavor. The piece is far unlike anything to come out of Soviet realism or out of the Brutalist periods that followed, unless, of course, one considers cold concrete to be more Brutalist than the copper that makes up the Statue of Liberty. Scott Palmer notes that:
"The resulting figure was clearly based on the "Nike of Samothrace" (220–219 B.C.), the world-famous statue of the Greek goddess of victory. When a few members of the artistic-expert committee suggested that the sculptor depict the Motherland in a costume more befitting her Russian national character, Vuchetich demurred. He claimed that doing so would detract from her monumentalism, dynamism, and expressiveness. Given that the Battle of Stalingrad "was an international event," dressing the figure in a national costume would be "inaccurate."

One of the issues in discussing the efforts and people that went into constructing The Motherland Calls and other Soviet monuments is the lack of primary source documents that survived the event. Aside from being in Russian and often inaccessible to the average non-Russian scholar, there is no way to know what was censored, destroyed, or purged by Stalin, the de-Stalinization process, or by later efforts from Russia as the Soviet successor state.

The monument's style calls for international unity yet hearkens its viewers to celebrate Russian nationalism. The sheer enormity of the monument and the myths surrounding the Great Patriotic War often overshadow the true horror and scope of what actually happened at Stalingrad. The monument towers over the landscape of the former Stalingrad – and over the material, social, and metaphysical context in which we understand the largest battle in human history.

(edited by Brad Poss and Laura Bailey)

Location

Metadata