Monument to the Destroyer Steregushchy

In Alexander Park, near Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, stands the monument to the destroyer Steregushchy — a rare example in the city of monumental sculpture in the Art Nouveau style and one of the last major monuments erected here before 1917. It commemorates the crew of the ship of the same name, who perished in an unequal naval battle, and remains one of the city's most poignant war memorials.

On the morning of 26 February 1904, two Russian destroyers were returning to Port Arthur after a night reconnaissance mission when they ran into four Japanese destroyers, later joined by two cruisers. The Reshitelny managed to break through, while the Steregushchy, surrounded, fought on alone. A shell disabled her boilers, the ship lost way, and her officers were killed one after another at their posts — the commander, Lieutenant Alexander Sergeyev, Midshipman Konstantin Kudrevich, and Lieutenant Nikolai Golovizin. By 7:10 the guns had fallen silent, and at 9:07 the wrecked hull slipped beneath the waves. Only four of the crew survived: Fyodor Yuryev, Ivan Khirinsky, Alexei Osinin and Vasily Novikov.

The monument was created by the sculptor Konstantin Izenberg together with the architect Alexander von Hohen; the foundation was calculated by Professor Vasily Sokolovsky, and the roughly 8,000-pood bronze composition was cast at Vasily Gavrilov's workshop. The five-metre structure, shaped like a giant cross, is faced with Finnish red “Tevsala” granite and depicts a fragment of the ship's hull with two sailors at an open valve — according to legend, these sailors flooded the ship rather than let it fall into enemy hands, although no such valve ever actually existed aboard the real Steregushchy.

The unveiling ceremony took place on 10 May 1911, attended by Nicholas II and his family together with the head of government, Pyotr Stolypin. Originally the lower part of the monument functioned as a fountain: water flowed through hidden pipes from the porthole into a granite basin, creating the effect of an actual sinking. The cascade quickly corroded the bronze and operated only intermittently: it was shut off in 1935 because of corrosion, restored in 1947, and in 1954 the sculptor's son, Vladimir Izenberg, carried out a restoration and reinstated the memorial plaque bearing the crew's names. The water system was finally dismantled in 1970 by decision of the Leningrad City Executive Committee.

The feat of the Steregushchy has become part of the city's cultural memory: the monument is mentioned in Mikhail Zoshchenko's autobiographical novella Before Sunrise and in the poetry of Pavel Luknitsky, while the destroyer's story is reflected in the prose of Valentin Pikul. In 1993 the State Museum of Urban Sculpture carried out a complete restoration of the monument, halting the deterioration caused by decades of contact with water.

Today the monument to the Steregushchy remains one of the recognisable landmarks of the Petrogradsky district — a rare example of Art Nouveau memorial sculpture that speaks not of victory but of the crew's self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming enemy forces. The five survivors who witnessed the battle and the dozens of sailors who died are immortalised in bronze on the very spot where residents still stop today to remember their story.