Everyone passing through Palace Square notices the huge Alexander Column, one of the most magnificent monuments in St Petersburg, topped with the statue of an angel.
However, few people know the statue was once denounced by the Soviets, and it was only by chance that the angel is where it is today.
The column itself was designed by Auguste de Montferrand to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon's army in 1812. It was made from a massive piece of granite found near the Gulf of Finland and was unveiled in 1834. Boris Orlovsky designed the angel to crown the 47.5-meter (158-foot) column.
The column stood peacefully in Palace Square until April 12, 1928, when the Bolshevik government issued a resolution calling for the destruction of "monuments to tsars and to their servants, if these monuments are not of great historic or artistic value."
But the "experts" who determined the degree of historic and artistic value hardly knew their three Rs, to say nothing about art and history. Their opinions hardly mattered, because once the ideological maestros made a decision, it stood. In St Petersburg alone, dozens of monuments were destroyed, including many of Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin.
Palace Square, considered to be the center of the October Revolution, became one of the first victims of this vandalism. Even its name was changed, as the Bolsheviks wanted nothing to remind people of tsars and their palaces. Instead, the square was name after Moisey Uritsky, the head of the local branch of the stained Cheka. The original name would be returned to Palace Square only in 1944.
After renaming the square and dismantling the delicate iron fence around the Winter Palace, Bolshevik ideological authorities turned their attention to the angel on the column. They declared that the statue of the angel was a "religious symbol alien to the construction of Communism."
They decided to remove the "anti-Communist" angel, but to leave the column itself. Either the Soviet experts found that the column had certain "historical or artistic value," or, more likely, decided that it would be too heavy to move, since it weighs 704 tons.
So, in the middle of the 1920s, Soviet ideologists discussed the problem of replacing the anti-Communist angel with something more revolutionary. The discussion was supported by the local Communist Party leader Grigory Zinoviev and, after his dismissal, by his successor Sergei Kirov. Among those who participated in the discussion was the Soviet Minister of Culture Anatoly Lunacharsky.
Among numerous variants, only three were seriously considered: a statue of Vladimir Lenin, a statue of Leon Trotsky and a statue of a Red Army soldier. There was a period when those deciding the angel's fate were accused of following Trotsky and Zinoviev and were dismissed or even arrested. Others became busy with the industrialization plan of the late 1920s.
By 1930, articles dealing with replacing the anti-Communist angel with something ideologically correct had ceased to appear in Soviet newspapers and magazines. In the early 1930s, the angel was "rehabilitated," as guidebooks published at that time refer to the Alexander Column as one of the best monuments in the city.