Monument to Alexander III

In the courtyard of the Marble Palace stands a bronze equestrian statue of Emperor Alexander III by sculptor Paolo Trubetzkoy — one of the most unusual monuments to a monarch in the history of Russian art. Unlike ceremonial images of the tsars, this sculpture is deliberately stripped of grandeur and idealization, which provoked mixed reactions among contemporaries at the time.

A special competition commission was formed in 1899, and in the spring of 1900, after a second round of deliberations, the choice fell on the project by Trubetzkoy, who was then living in Moscow; the pedestal for the equestrian statue was proposed by architects Alexander Tomishko and Fyodor Schechtel. The sculptor worked on the image of the emperor from 1899 to 1906, right up until his departure abroad. A glass-and-metal workshop pavilion was built for him not far from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, where several preparatory models were created, ranging from small sketches to full-scale versions. In the sculptor's absence, the casting of the bronze figure was carried out by the Italian founder Ettore Sperati: the emperor's figure was cast at K. Robecchi's workshop, and the horse at the Obukhov Steel Works. The pedestal, made of reddish Valaam granite, was given a simplified rectangular shape.

The monument's total height is 8.5 meters: the figure accounts for about 5 meters, and the pedestal for over 3 meters. Alexander III is depicted as heavyset, in loose, baggy clothing, sitting heavily on a squat horse — without ceremonial bearing or triumphant gestures. Trubetzkoy sought to convey not a literal portrait likeness for its own sake, but the overall character of the man, an approach that stood in sharp contrast to the tradition of equestrian monuments. Some of the emperor's relatives considered the image almost a caricature, while the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna judged the likeness successful and insisted that the work be completed.

The monument was solemnly unveiled on May 23 (June 5), 1909, on Znamenskaya Square in front of the Nikolaevsky (now Moskovsky) railway station, and was associated with the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway. After the revolutionary events of 1917, the monument was repeatedly used for propaganda purposes: in 1919 a sarcastic poem by Demyan Bedny was carved onto the pedestal, and for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution architect Ivan Fomin enclosed the figure in a metal cage amid revolutionary symbols. In October 1937 the monument was dismantled and moved to the courtyard of the Russian Museum, and some of the blocks from the dismantled pedestal were later used in the construction of other monuments.

Only in 1994 was the statue again placed on a pedestal at the entrance to the Marble Palace, which by then had already become part of the Russian Museum as a separate exhibition venue. Despite proposals that periodically arise for relocating the monument to its historic site near Moskovsky Station, the monument remains in its current location. It is part of the Russian Museum's collection as an example of early-twentieth-century monumental sculpture and draws visitors' attention with its unusual, down-to-earth, unpretentious yet expressive treatment of an autocrat's image.