Lenin – Tverskaya Square – Ludvig14

Monument to VI Lenin on Tverskaya Square

Monument to Lenin on Tverskaya Square (Russian: Памятник Ленину на Тверской площади) is a sculpture of V.I. Lenin located at the back of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History building in Moscow. Established in 1940. The authors of the monument were sculptor Sergey Dmitriyevich Merkurov and architect I. A. Frantsuz. The monument has the status of an object of cultural heritage of federal significance.

The sculpture of V.I. Lenin is made of red granite. It is installed on a pedestal made of blocks of dark gray granite. Lenin is depicted seated and tilted forward. It seems that he listens carefully to his interlocutor. With his left hand, Lenin leaned on his knee, with a notebook in it. The right hand with a pencil – behind the back of the chair. According to art historian N. D. Sobolevsky, ‘the plastic expression of the sculptural image is in perfect harmony with the psychologically vivid image of Ilyich’. [Perhaps due to a poor translation but I have no idea what that means.]

The location of the monument was not chosen randomly. Lenin repeatedly spoke at the Tverskaya (then Soviet) Square from the balcony of the Moscow City Council building (now Moscow City Hall), which is reminiscent of a memorial plaque. The monument was installed in front of the building of the Lenin Institute under the Central Committee of the CPSU (B).

Before the installation of the monument, the sculpture of Lenin was demonstrated at the World Exhibition in 1939 in New York City.

Text above from Wikipedia.

VI Lenin – Tverskaya Square

When this statue was initially installed the area was very different from what it is now.

In 1940 anyone going into the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute by the main entrance would have passed this statue. At some time in the next 30 years or so the main entrance to the Institute was changed to the other side of the building so the statue then became the focal point of the public square that was between the Institute and Tverskaya Street, across which is the Moscow City Council building. (There are interesting bas reliefs, one of them of Lenin, on the street level wall on either side of the main entrance of the Council building facing Tverskaya Square.)

However, part of this square has now been taken over by what seems a cross between a restaurant and a garden centre – with the installation of some imperial statue close to the main road. Although ‘officially’ not part of this ‘development’ it seems that the owners have also taken over the small part of the square that was immediately in front of Lenin’s statue. This area has been fenced off in a semi-permanent manner as a storage area for plants and garden material and so denying public access to the garden itself and the statue.

This was the first such ‘privatisation’ of a public space I encountered in Moscow as, in general, public spaces of Soviet times still remain in the public domain – not as in Albania, for example, where there was a free for all in grabbing as much of the public space as possible.

This meant that the photos in the slide show were taken either over or through the fence – not the most ideal of conditions for recording the sculpture. Hopefully what has been recorded gives an idea of the art work.