🖼 Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad

пл. Победы

An underground memorial hall

The authors are the architects Valentin Kamensky and Sergey Speransky and the sculptor Mikhail Anikushin, all participants in the defence of Leningrad.
The monument was built for the 30th anniversary of Victory partly with public donations — about 2 million rubles were collected.
The underground memorial hall opened on 23 February 1978 and is now part of the Museum of the History of the City.
The hall is surrounded by a broken ring 40 m across, faced with granite, with the inscription “900 days — 900 nights” on either side of the break.
The granite obelisk rises 48 metres.
26 bronze figures of defenders face the Pulkovo Heights, the former front line.
Lines by Olga Berggolts were removed from the design for ideological reasons; Yury Voronov's words “O stones! Be steadfast like people!” were cast instead.