Monument to Alexander II

In the public garden on Volkhonka, by the altar end of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, stands a bronze figure of Emperor Alexander II — a ruler who went down in history as the Tsar Liberator. The monument was installed in 2005, almost a century after similar monuments to Russian sovereigns were torn down in the early Soviet years. Today it is one of the few monuments in Moscow to a member of the imperial dynasty erected in recent times.

The question of a site for the future sculpture was discussed several times by the Moscow City Duma: first the figure was to be placed in the Alexander Garden, then near the Kutafya Tower of the Kremlin, but the Kremlin option was rejected by the Federal Protective Service. Because the site kept changing, the sculptor, Alexander Rukavishnikov, had to remake the statue’s head three times even after casting — one of the rejected versions is still kept in his studio to this day. In the end, the finished figure, which had stood in the studio for a year, was decided to be installed by the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour — on the spot where, from 1912 to 1918, a monument to the emperor’s son, Alexander III, had already stood.

The sovereign is depicted full-length, in a military uniform with a tsar’s mantle draped over it; viewed from Vsekhsvyatsky Proezd, his figure seems to turn to face the cathedral’s domes. The bronze cast is over six meters tall and weighs about seven tons, resting on a marble-clad pedestal three meters high; behind the sculpture stand two lion figures, and the whole composition is framed by a low semicircular colonnade. Inscriptions on the pedestal list the main achievements of the reign — the abolition of serfdom, the zemstvo reform, military and judicial reforms, and the ending of the protracted war in the Caucasus.

The opening ceremony took place on 7 June 2005. It was attended by the Minister of Culture Alexander Sokolov, the Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov, as well as the politician Boris Nemtsov and the businessman Alfred Koch, who had initiated the project. Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia personally consecrated the monument in the presence of several hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church and representatives of the Moscow authorities.

The idea for the monument belonged to the Union of Right Forces party: its construction was paid for by party members and supporters together with the Moscow city government. Working on the project alongside Rukavishnikov were the architect Igor Voskresensky, responsible for organizing the garden’s space, and the artist Sergei Sharov; the three of them deliberately avoided copying pre-revolutionary models and created their own composition, combining classical sculptural techniques with the visual language of the modern city.

Two decades after its installation, the monument remains part of the familiar appearance of the embankment by the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and one of the places where tourists learn about the history of Alexander II’s reforms — the greatest transformations in the country’s nineteenth-century life, which changed the structure of Russian society and the state.