Faces of Peter destroyed by march of history

In the city of Peter, only two statues of the great man made it through the troubled years after the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviets, in their quest for ideologically correct art, left only the Bronze Horseman and the monument in front of the Engineers Castle. YEVGENIA GLICKMAN examines the lost statues that didn't make it through the Revolution.

Highly appreciated both by contemporary art critics and by the population of the city, the statue was, nevertheless, deemed bourgeois and ugly by the Bolsheviks and destroyed in January 1919.

A copy of the Tsar-Carpenter, dating back to 1913 and somewhat smaller in size, remained in the Summer Gardens. But in 1930, that was torn down because its bronze was necessary for "the industrialization of the country," according to a newspaper report.

Fortunately, one copy still exists, although not in St Petersburg. Since 1911, the copy has been in the central square of Zaandam, Netherlands.

Another Bernstam statue -- Peter the Great Saving Shipwrecked Fishermen -- used to stand in front of the eastern wing of the Admiralty. But it met the same fate as the Tsar-Carpenter -- in January 1919, it was destroyed.

The original of a statue by Mark Antokolsky stands in the Russian museum. Its bronze copies, however, were deemed unartistic by Soviet authorities.

One of them was placed in 1909 in front of the Cathedral of St Sampson (41 Bolshoy Sampsonievsky Prospect) to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava. The church survived Soviet desecration, but the statue was destroyed in the 1930s.

The other copy of the Antokolsky statue was unveiled on May 13, 1910, in front of the hospital of Preobrazhensky regiment -- the regiment founded by Peter the Great about 200 years before. Twenty years later, the statue was destroyed.

Unlike Antokolsky, Ilya Ginzburg was not famous all over Russia, but he was quite a successful sculptor, and the bust of Peter the Great he made by the order of Okhta District Society was among the best sculptural works of that period.

Unveiled on September 25, 1911, the bronze bust was placed in a little park in front of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Greater Okhta. This district had originally been inhabited by carpenters who, by Peter's orders, came from Russia's northern regions to make ships for the Russian Navy and build houses in the new Russian capital.

That statue lasted only eight years before it disappeared.

Early in the 1910, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Arsenal, a competition was announced for the best statue of Peter the Great to be installed in front of the building of the New Arsenal, 1 Ulitsa Komsomola).

The winner of the competition was the talented young sculptor Vsevolod Lishev. His work -- the statue of Peter the Great standing near a cannon -- was unveiled on April 21, 1914.

The statue did not live long: in 1919, it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

As for Lishev, he became an outstanding Soviet sculptor, and some of his works of the Soviet period (statues of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Alexander Griboyedov) can be seen in St Petersburg.

Unfortunately, none of these statues can compare with the sculptor's earlier work, now lost forever.