Victory Park

In the west of Moscow, between Kutuzovsky Prospekt and Minskaya Street, lies Victory Park on Poklonnaya Hill — a memorial complex covering 135 hectares and one of the country's largest monuments to the defeat of Nazism. It opened on May 9, 1995, for the fiftieth anniversary of Victory Day.

Poklonnaya Hill itself has been known since ancient times: it is mentioned in the chronicle compilation known as the Bychowiec Chronicle under the year 1368, and in 1612 the hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski stood here, receiving a Moscow delegation that proposed placing Crown Prince Władysław on the throne. In September 1812, Napoleon waited in vain on this hill for a delegation bearing the keys to the Kremlin. When construction of the park began in the 1990s, the original hill was leveled and the soil moved eastward. The idea of creating a war memorial here was first proposed in 1942 by the architect Yakov Chernikhov, and in 1955 Marshal Zhukov made a similar proposal to the Central Committee of the CPSU. In 1958 a memorial stone was placed on the hill and a design competition was announced, drawing one hundred fifty entries, none of which was approved; the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich won a later closed competition.

After Vuchetich's death, the work was continued in 1975 by a new team — sculptor Nikolai Tomsky together with architects Golubovsky and Korabelnikov. To the 194 million rubles collected in public donations during the 1970s–1980s, state funds were added, implementation was entrusted to Anatoly Polyansky, and construction began in earnest in the late 1980s. The project sparked protests from Muscovites concerned about the fate of the landscape: in May 1987, several hundred people gathered on Manezhnaya Square. Despite this, the park and museum opened as planned on May 9, 1995.

The center of the ensemble is an obelisk on Victors’ Square, 141.8 meters tall — the number symbolizing the 1,418 days of the war; a bronze figure of the goddess Nike is fixed at the top, and at its base stands a statue of St. George the Victorious by Zurab Tsereteli. The Victory Museum building, built to the same design, houses about 50,000 exhibits, including the original Victory Banner. Nearby stand the Church of St. George the Victorious, consecrated by Patriarch Alexy II in May 1995, along with a mosque (1997) and a synagogue with a Holocaust museum (1998), added later, and Tsereteli’s composition “Tragedy of the Peoples,” in memory of the victims of genocide.

The ensemble continues to grow today: in 2010 an Eternal Flame, carrying a spark from the flame at the main memorial to the Unknown Soldier, was lit on Victors' Square, and in the 2010s monuments to war dogs, heroes of the First World War, and Cities of Military Glory were added. Since 2014 the territory has been managed by the “Poklonnaya Gora” municipal institution, which is also developing recreational infrastructure — playgrounds, workout areas, a skate park — while the open-air exhibition of military equipment continues the museum display right in the park.

From an ancient hill to the country’s largest monument to the victory over Nazism, Poklonnaya Hill has come a long way. Today the park remains the nation’s principal site of remembrance of the war, where temples of different faiths stand alongside monuments to different generations of the country's defenders.