During the past month the people of St Petersburg have been caught up, and rightly so, with the euphoria of the Victory Day celebrations against fascism.
Of course no people on earth suffered under Hitler's hands like the Russians, but it's easy to forget that the Russians as a nation have been to themselves equally as cruel. As the battleships on May 9 sported different flags along the River Neva celebrating Hitler's defeat, a just as meaningful message was being made further up the river.
The statement is made by a new monument on Robespierre embankment across the river from the Kresty Prison. The latest St Petersburg sphinx is a memorial to the victims of political repression and has been fittingly placed just across from the former KGB building where the victims of Stalin's repressions were taken for interrogation.
The message of these sphinxes is that it must not be forgotten that during the 1930s Stalin began a reign of terror directed against the Russian people. The terror was directed not only against the peasantry and the survivors of capitalism, but in successive waves of arrests, trials and purges against Soviet society and the very political structure in Russia. It was Stalin who initiated the purges, destroying before the war began the best trained and qualified in the armed forces, who could possibly have averted, deterred or at least stemmed the German attack.
And then after the war, when the blood of more than 20 million lives had been shed, Stalin ruthlessly continued to butcher and murder his people, this time not only repeating it in Russia but exporting it abroad to the Eastern Bloc countries enslaved under his rule. Mikhail Chemiakin's monuments sit facing each other and share the features of many sphinxes around the city, staring blankly at nothing. Part of its face is a skull, neatly split into two, grinning into its own reflection. They recline on pedestals bearing inscriptions from a few of the innumerable victims of the different forms of political repression. One sphinx bears quotations from Mandelshtam and Gumilev -- Stalin's generation of persecuted poets and thinkers.
Famed Leningrad poet Anna Akhmatova finally has her rightful monument at the place where she spent so long awaiting news of her son, a victim of the purges. The sphinx opposite carries quotations from a new generation of victims who escaped the Stalinist terrors but faced a new epoch of bigotry and ignorance.
Among the other poets honored here are the late singer Vladimir Vysotsky and Joseph Brodsky, a Nobel laureate who now lives in the US.
How many in all were arrested, shot or sent to camps between 1934 and 1954 remains a question which can never be satisfactorily answered. The British political historian Robert Conquest estimates 18 million deaths between 1930 and 1939 alone. The Russian historian GeneralVolkogonov suggests 16 million while some Soviet historians estimate 20 million.
Like the sphinx, the Terror was silent and mysterious -- a riddle that struck like lighting out of nowhere. People living during these terrible times convinced themselves that the best way to avoid trouble was to know nothing about what happened next door, to hear none of the cries in the middle of the night and not to ask why a colleague failed to turn up to work.
As non-Russian residents of the city, we can only welcome the addition of Chemiakin's work to the municipal collection. It serves to remind us that while one bloody war was being waged from without, another, equally bloody war had been going on in Russian territory from within. Values are being reexamined, and the Russian people are being allowed to face their murky and less heroic past.