Museum Review: Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad

Cost: Free to students with student ID
Cultural Experience: 5 out of 5

I found this monument and museum to be deeply affecting. From start to finish, you can see the Soviet narrative of what happened during the siege of Leningrad-- and let me say, it's a starkly depressing but inspiring narrative.

Note, this is not how I plan on executing most museum reviews; normally, I hate sounding like a dry professor in the middle of a dull history lesson. But due to the subject, and the way that this museum is structured, there's no room for humor; and rather than simply say what it is, I think with this museum, it's better if I show, rather than tell.

Structure of the Monument

Entering from the front, there are statues of "fallen heroes" on either side of you, and a statue of two men before you in front of an obelisk. This is the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad.

This is roughly how it looks; all the pictures shown in this post can be seen in the album "Moskovskaya."

Note the years written on the obelisk. This is how long Leningrad was blockaded by the Germans: 900 days, and 900 nights.

If you walk past the obelisk and down the stairs, there is a bush with plates surrounding it. On each of the plates are the names of the cities that were affected by the siege of Leningrad:

 

 

(For those who don't speak Russian, those names are: Novosibirsk, Kerch', Sevastapol, Smolensk, Tula, Krepost Brest, Murmansk, Kiev, Moscow, Minsk, Odessa, and Volgoryad.)

The exits to and from the Memorial Hall are on either side of this bush; however, looking forward from here, you can see the main part of the monument.

In the center is a statue of the victims, and heroes, of the Siege of Leningrad; and all around, torches light up the memorial writing dedicated to the fallen. Also, interestingly enough, the symbols on the wall are all different orders, and honors; only one of them, the Order of Lenin, is repeated twice.

                                         

(Kudos to whoever knows what these orders actually mean.)

When you walk into this area, you walk into a break from the circular overhang; and on either side of the overhang are the words, "900 days" and "900 nights".

                  

                   

The Memorial Hall

The tone is just as somber the moment you walk in: a wall dedicated to the fallen of the Siege of Leningrad, and red mood-lighting leading the way into the actual museum.

 

The museum itself is absolutely gorgeous-- not huge, by any stretch of the imagination, but still very effective in setting the mood. And here's where I get to actually reviewing.

The lighting makes every thing more intense; however, as all of the exhibits are covered in glass, this makes taking photos somewhat difficult. (It should be obvious from the number of photos that photography is allowed here; still, I found that a good policy is always asking if it's allowed, rather than finding out the hard way.) This museum also utilizes multimedia in the form of music (very appropriately somber), films (the films are what got to me the most-- footage from the siege, including people carrying sleds filled with dead bodies from the streets), and pictures, as well as a giant light-up map of the siege and cities affected by it. 

Rather than try to talk about the actual exhibition, I decided it would be best to present everything as I saw it; however, I can explain the way that the museum is organized. The part that you see when first walking in-- the one shown here-- is when the war first broke out, followed by the other side, which is the eventual victory. All along the way, there are different artifacts to demonstrate the varying aspects of the war effort-- the soldiers, the navy, anti-aircraft efforts-- along with a plaque, both in English and Russian. And different forms of wartime media cover the walls, which, in certain cases, could be equally disturbing.

For example:

Caricatures of Hitler

             

      

          Goebbels (also spelled Gebbels; Hitler's Head of Propaganda)

            

      

Goering (Head of the Luftwafa, and at one point, Hitler's second-in-command)

            

      

Himmler (Chief of Police and head of the SS)

            

      

Antonescu (Authoritarian dictator of Romania during WWII times)

            

      

Laval (Second-in-command of the Vichy Government in France)

            

      

And Mannerheim (Commander-in-Chief of Finland's Defense Forces)

            

      

Overall, this museum was incredibly effective at delivering the desired narrative, and was very informative. I highly recommend it. I will be including the actual narrative as laid out by the museum in another post; the exhibits speak for themselves.