Monuments of Saint Petersburg

The Bronze Horseman

It stands on Senate Square, near the Admiralty, facing the Neva. Older accounts call it "one of many tributes to the city's founder", which undersells it: this is the monument to Peter the Great.

The sculptor was Étienne Maurice Falconet, recommended to Catherine II by Diderot. One name older accounts never give belongs in the first sentence: Marie-Anne Collot, Falconet's pupil, modelled Peter's head, working from the death mask and portraits, and made it three times before Catherine approved it. She was admitted to the Academy of Arts with a life pension for it. The bronze was cast by Emelyan Khailov between 1774 and 1778; Falconet fell out with Catherine and left Russia in 1778, so he was not present at the unveiling, and the work was completed by Yury Felten and Fyodor Gordeyev.

Gordeyev's serpent, under the horse's hooves, is usually described as allegory — treachery, or Peter's enemies, depending on the account. It is also the statue's third point of support. It is doing structural work as well as symbolic work, which is the better version of the fact.

Catherine chose the inscription: Petro Primo Catharina Secunda, with the Russian in parallel, and the date 1782. It is not modesty. It presents her reign as the continuation of Peter's, which was precisely the claim she needed to make.

The Thunder Stone, and the stone older accounts confuse it with

Older accounts describe the pedestal as "a single block of red granite molded in the shape of a cliff". Two errors in nine words.

It is not red granite. It is rapakivi — a coarse Fennoscandian granite with distinctive ovoid feldspar crystals. Red Finnish granite is what the Alexander Column is made of, so the two monuments appear to have been swapped. And it was not moulded but dressed and carved by hand, on site.

The stone was found in 1768 by a peasant, Semyon Vishnyakov, in woodland near Konnaya Lakhta, some six kilometres inland from the Gulf; he was paid a hundred roubles for it. Estimates of its original mass run from about 1,500 to 1,600 tonnes, reduced to roughly 1,250 by dressing.

Moving it was the achievement. The Greek engineer Marin Carburi devised a metal sled running on bronze spheres about thirteen centimetres across, set in grooved tracks — a hand-built ball race. It was hauled by manpower alone across frozen ground in winter, then carried on a purpose-built barge flanked by two warships, and reached the square on 26 September 1770. Accounts of the labour vary between about four hundred men over nine months and a shorter, larger effort; it is still recorded as the largest stone ever moved by human power alone.

Two more things older accounts leave out. The name Bronze Horseman comes from Pushkin's poem of 1833 — in Russian the Copper Horseman, which is why older English translations sometimes call it that. And in the siege the statue was boarded with timber shields and packed with sandbags where it stood rather than evacuated, and came through essentially unharmed.

The square's name has moved about as well: Senate Square from 1763, officially Petrovskaya from 1782, Decembrists' Square from 1925, and Senate Square again from 2008. Older accounts use a name the square did not have at the time of writing.

The Alexander Column

Here older accounts get one thing right and most of the rest either vague or invented. The architect was Auguste de Montferrand, and he did also build St Isaac's Cathedral, so that sentence survives.

The column was built between 1830 and 1834, commemorating Alexander I and the defeat of Napoleon. The shaft is a single monolith of red granite from the Pyterlahti quarry near Vyborg, in Finland — the same quarry that supplied St Isaac's columns — separated from the rock by hand over about two years and shipped on a vessel built for the purpose. It is roughly 25.5 metres long and some 600 tonnes, and the whole monument stands 47.5 metres, which older accounts have right.

The shaft was raised on 30 August 1832, and this is the fact worth the space. The scaffolding, blocks and capstans were designed by Augustin Betancourt; sources put the manpower at between two and three thousand, and the lift took well under two hours. The monument was unveiled two years later, on 30 August 1834.

The angel on top is by Boris Orlovsky, holds a cross and treads on a serpent; it is about four metres high, the cross over six. It is generally said to have been given the features of Alexander I, though that is an attribution rather than a documented instruction.

The claim that it stands unanchored is true, and the romantic version of it is not. The shaft genuinely rests on the pedestal with no fastening, held by its own mass and the precision of its fit. But there is a substantial foundation of 1,250 pine piles with granite above; the four-hundred-tonne base stone was bedded onto it in mortar mixed with cement, vodka and soap; the granite base has since cracked under the load; and a bronze hoop Montferrand proposed to restrain it was never fitted. So the shaft is unfastened. The monument is not unfounded.

One claim in older accounts should go entirely. They say the cross is "not Russian Orthodox, but Protestant". There is no support for that anywhere. What is actually distinctive is that the angel holds a plain four-pointed Latin cross rather than the Russian eight-pointed form with its upper titulus and slanted foot-rest — a real observation about a French neoclassicist working in an Orthodox capital, but not a Protestant marker, since the Latin cross was used freely in Russian imperial art and Montferrand came from a Catholic country.

The siege treated this monument differently from the Bronze Horseman, and the contrast is telling: it was camouflaged only to about two-thirds of its height, the angel took shrapnel, and more than a hundred shrapnel marks were counted on the pedestal reliefs. The surrounding railing had already been melted down for cartridge cases in the 1930s; the present one was re-created in 2004.

The monument to Catherine the Great

It stands in Ostrovsky Square — Alexandrinskaya Square until 1923 — in front of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Mikhail Mikeshin designed it and began work in 1860; the figure of Catherine, four and a third metres high, was executed by Matvey Chizhov, the nine surrounding figures by Alexander Opekushin, and the pedestal and architectural setting by David Grimm, who directed the whole project, with Viktor Schröter. It was unveiled on 24 November 1873, which older accounts have right to the year.

The nine figures, which older accounts reduce to three, are:

• Pyotr Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky, field marshal
• Grigory Potemkin, statesman
• Alexander Suvorov, generalissimo
• Gavriil Derzhavin, poet
• Yekaterina Dashkova
• Alexander Bezborodko, chancellor
• Ivan Betskoy, educational reformer
• Vasily Chichagov, admiral
• Alexey Orlov-Chesmensky, admiral

On Dashkova, older accounts say she was "the first woman to chair the Russian Academy of Sciences", which conflates two different institutions. She was appointed Director of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in January 1783, and separately became the founding President of the Russian Academy — the language academy, which she established — in October of the same year, holding both posts until 1796. The usual claim that she was the first woman anywhere to head a national academy of sciences is widely repeated, though not well sourced.

Something older accounts cannot know, because it was not carried out: in the early 1930s the city's party organs planned to dismantle the monument, put a statue of Lenin on the pedestal and replace the nine figures with members of the Politburo.

The description of Catherine as having "almost single-handedly led Russia into the modern European world" is not a fact about a monument and does not survive contact with the period.

The triumphal gates

Older accounts refer to "the Triumphal Arch" without saying which one they mean. There are two free-standing triumphal gates and one great ceremonial arch, and they are different kinds of thing.

The Narva Triumphal Gate. Quarenghi put up a predecessor in wood and alabaster in a single month in 1814, to greet the Guards coming home from Europe; it rotted, and Nicholas I ordered a stone replacement a little to the south. Vasily Stasov's arch was begun on 26 August 1827 and opened on 17 August 1834, inscribed with the battles and the Guards regiments of the campaigns of 1812 to 1814. Its brick core was clad in copper sheet — replaced with iron between 1877 and 1880, which made the corrosion worse. The sculpture is a roll-call: the six-horse chariot by Pyotr Klodt, his first major commission, with Pimenov, Demut-Malinovsky, Krylov, Tokarev and Leppe. A crowd burned it on 28 February 1917; it took more than two thousand shell holes in the Second World War and was restored from 1949. Its three-storey interior houses a department of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture.

The Moscow Triumphal Gate, also Stasov's, was begun on 14 September 1834 and opened on 16 October 1838. It commemorates the Russo-Persian war of 1826–28, the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–29 and the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830–31, under an inscription composed by Nicholas I himself — later judged politically awkward. It has twelve cast-iron Doric columns in six pairs, each about fifteen metres high and over two across, with genii and trophies by Orlovsky cast at the Alexandrovsky foundry.

Then the part that makes it the most interesting monument in the city. In 1936 it was dismantled, piece by piece between 17 August and 30 September, nominally to be re-erected elsewhere and actually because of a road scheme; architects objected and the guardhouses were simply demolished. The scholarly literature records that during the siege the column sections were used in barricades on the southern approaches, the great cast-iron cylinders serving as anti-tank obstacles, some laid on their sides as shelters. The decision to rebuild came in 1956; a 1957 inventory found about a quarter of the parts lost and they were recast; the gate was re-erected between 1959 and 1961. A monument to victory, taken down by the state that built it, then used to stop tanks, then put back from spare parts.

The General Staff Building arch on Palace Square is Carlo Rossi's, part of his remodelling of the square between 1819 and 1829, twenty-eight metres high, topped by the Chariot of Glory by Pimenov and Demut-Malinovsky. The bowed façade it belongs to runs five hundred and eighty metres. It is worth being precise about what it is: an architectural element of a ministry building rather than a third triumphal gate, which is a more interesting fact than treating it as one.

Three more

• The monument to Nicholas I on St Isaac's Square, to Montferrand's design approved in May 1856, with the equestrian group modelled and cast by Pyotr Klodt and unveiled on 25 June 1859. Sixteen metres overall, the group six. It is a rare example of a bronze of that size carried on only two points of support, the horse's hind legs — a genuine distinction, and one that attracts superlatives it does not need. It was nearly removed after the revolution and survived, reportedly because the engineering was admired, and in the war it was boxed and sandbagged like the Bronze Horseman.
• The Rumyantsev obelisk, by Vincenzo Brenna, commissioned by Paul I and erected on the Field of Mars in 1799, then moved in 1818 to Vasilyevsky Island under Rossi's supervision — beside the Academy of Fine Arts and the cadet corps where Rumyantsev was educated. Serdobol granite with a gilded bronze sphere and eagle. It is the city's earliest surviving commemorative obelisk, and it commemorates the same man who stands at Catherine's feet across the river.
• The monument to Alexander Nevsky on Alexander Nevsky Square, unveiled on 9 May 2002 — begun by Valentin Kozenyuk in 1967 and finished after his death in 1997 by his pupil Alexander Palmin with V. V. Popov. Thirty-five years from model to unveiling, and the one major addition to the city's monuments since the Soviet period.

One set of sculpture belongs here by right and is described among the bridges: Klodt's four horse-tamers on the Anichkov Bridge. The siege treated them differently again. The large monuments were sandbagged and boarded where they stood; the horse-tamers were taken down and buried in the garden of the Anichkov Palace, and came back in June 1945.