Mikhail Shemyakin's Sphinxes (Monument to the Victims of Political Repression)

On Voskresenskaya Embankment of the Neva, opposite the Kresty prison, stand two bronze sphinx sculptures by the artist Mikhail Shemyakin — the central element of a memorial dedicated to the millions of Soviet citizens who perished or suffered during the years of Soviet terror. The faces of the sculptures are divided vertically into two halves: from the side of the residential buildings the viewer sees the profile of a young woman, while from the side of the river and the prison opposite, a bare skull. In this way the artists expressed the idea of the tragic rift the country experienced during the Soviet decades.

The idea for the monument came to Shemyakin even before perestroika — as a young man the artist had been subjected to psychiatric repression and in 1971 was expelled from the country. The sculptor created the sphinx figures themselves in 1992: originally they were dedicated to the biblical story of the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, and Stars of David were placed on the pedestals, later concealed by memorial plaques. The initiative to turn the sculptures into a memorial to the repressed was supported by the city authorities headed by Governor Anatoly Sobchak, with the costs borne by the sculptor and by entrepreneurs. The opening took place on 28 April 1995.

The creatures, with the body of a lion and the head of a woman in stylised Egyptian headdresses — the nemes and the pschent — lie on granite pedestals fifteen metres apart; each figure is about one and a half metres tall. The architectural design of the memorial was developed by Vyacheslav Bukhaev and Anatoly Vasilyev. Between the sphinxes, on the embankment parapet, a figure of an early Christian cross is assembled from granite blocks, with an opening imitating a prison window and a wreath of barbed wire. The path is paved with a cross of cobblestones, the number of stones in which symbolically corresponds to the number of the repressed — ten thousand people per stone. Plaques bearing lines by Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev, Varlam Shalamov and Joseph Brodsky are fixed to the pedestals.

The unveiling of the monument was accompanied by controversy from the very start: critics pointed to the absence of an open competition and public discussion of the project. The memorial has repeatedly suffered vandalism — plaques, the wreath and a bronze rose were stolen from the pedestals, and in April 2001 the central part of the composition was toppled from the embankment parapet; the repair was then paid for by the city administration.

Today the monument remains one of the best-known memorials to the victims of political repression in Russia, alongside the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow and in St Petersburg. Flowers are traditionally laid at the sphinxes on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, and nearby, in 2006, a monument to Anna Akhmatova was unveiled, continuing this memorial line along the embankment.

The site of the installation was chosen deliberately: the panorama of the red-brick buildings of Kresty on the opposite bank of the Neva serves as the backdrop to the composition, and the proximity of the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt, which over the years housed the state security agencies, completes the symbolic ensemble of remembrance.