Monument to Yuri Dolgoruky

On Tverskaya Square, facing the building of the Moscow mayor’s office, rises a bronze equestrian statue — a monument to Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, during whose reign the city was first mentioned in a chronicle under the year 1147. Unveiled in 1954, the monument has long been one of the capital’s chief symbols and an obligatory backdrop for City Day celebrations.

The idea of commemorating the city’s founder arose for Moscow’s 800th anniversary, which the Soviet leadership decided to mark on a grand scale in the autumn of 1947. On Stalin’s personal order, an expedition led by the archaeologist Mikhail Gerasimov was even sent to Kyiv in search of the prince’s grave for a ceremonial reburial of his remains, but the undertaking failed — the presumed burial site turned out to be false. In the autumn of 1946 a design competition was held, won by the sculptor Sergei Orlov, who was awarded the Stalin Prize for the work; he was assisted by the experienced masters Alexander Antropov and Nikolai Shtamm. The monument’s foundation was laid on 6 September 1947, but disputes among the co-authors and a shortage of funds delayed construction until June 1954.

Before the revolution, a monument to General Skobelev, hero of the Russo-Turkish War, stood on this spot; it was torn down in 1918 as a symbol of tsarist power. On the vacated pedestal rose a faceted obelisk to the Soviet constitution topped with a bronze statue of Liberty by Nikolai Andreyev — it was popular among Muscovites but stood only briefly: the flimsily built monument was dismantled on the eve of the war, in April 1941. The head of the Liberty statue survived by chance and is now kept in the Tretyakov Gallery.

Since no reliable images of the prince have survived, the sculptors created a composite image of a warrior: rising in his stirrups, the rider imperiously points ahead, as if choosing a site for a future fortress. The round shield on his arm bears the ancient symbol of Moscow, St. George the Victorious, while the pedestal is covered with carvings echoing the white-stone ornamentation of the St. George’s Cathedral in Yuryev-Polsky, where centaurs, the legendary bird Sirin, griffins, and lions appear side by side.

The monument was far from immediately embraced: old Bolsheviks called the figure of the prince ideologically alien on what was then Soviet Square, and Nikita Khrushchev, according to legend, ordered the removal of overly naturalistic details from the horse’s anatomy. In 1962 the authorities even prepared a decree to relocate the monument in order to restore the demolished statue of Liberty, but after Khrushchev’s removal from power in 1964 the plan was forgotten. The bronze prince achieved genuine popularity only during perestroika and especially during the years of Mayor Luzhkov, when it became the chief symbol of Moscow’s celebrations.

Curiously, the presumed remains of Yuri Dolgoruky, found in Kyiv in 1989, suggest an image far removed from the monumental hero: according to anthropologists’ findings, the prince was short, stocky, and suffered from back pain. The Moscow sculpture, however, never claimed portrait accuracy — it is a composite image of the city’s founder that has become an inseparable part of the urban landscape and folklore.