The Monument to the "Fighters of the Revolution" on the Field of Mars marks the burial place of the victims of the revolutionary events of February 1917. The competition for his project was announced immediately after the funeral ceremony on April 5, 1917, which was announced in the Petrograd newspapers. The competition commission was made up of architects, artists and writers: I. A. Fomin, A. N. Benois, K. S. Petrov-Vodkin, M. V. Dobuzhinsky, I. Ya. Bilibin, A. A. Blok, A. M Gorky and A. V. Lunacharsky.
The commission received 11 sketches of the monument for discussion.
One of them was a huge four-sided metal pyramid with a female figure on
top - a symbol of the freedom of the Russian people. Another applicant
proposed to create a monument in the form of a giant cube, resting its
corners on inverted truncated pyramids. Among others, there was a
variant of the monument in the form of a high four-tiered tower with
rooms built into it. The contestants did not hesitate to imitate A.
Montferrand, offering to install a column 32 meters high on the Champ de
Mars. Most of the projects considered by the commission were
disproportionate to the scale of the installation site, they could
distort the historical appearance of the center of St. Petersburg.
The project of the monument to the "Fighters of the Revolution" by
the young architect Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev under the motto "Ready
Stones" turned out to be the best. Given the lack of funds, it turned
out to be extremely effective to suggest using the remains of the Salny
Buyan for the monument. The complex of barns on the Pryazhka River was
dismantled back in 1913-1914 to expand the shipyard, after which huge
blocks of granite remained on the banks of the Neva.
The monument
to the "Fighters of the Revolution" was opened on the Field of Mars on
November 7, 1919. Epitaphs composed by the People's Commissar of
Education A. V. Lunacharsky in hexameter size are carved on eight of its
corner slabs. One of them:
Not knowing the names
All the
heroes of the struggle
For freedom
Who gave his blood
human
race
Honors the Nameless
To all of them in memory
And honor
This stone
For many years
Erected
(In Russian, it also
sounds strange, this is not a translation problem)
The monument
changed the original meaning of the Field of Mars. If in tsarist times
military parades and festivities were held here, then under Soviet rule
the square turned into a kind of pantheon. No wonder the Champ de Mars
for some time was officially called the Square of the Victims of the
Revolution.
On November 6, 1957, the first eternal flame in the
USSR was lit in the center of the monument to the "Fighters of the
Revolution". It was ignited by a torch lit in the open-hearth furnace of
the Kirov plant. It was from this fire that on May 9, 1960, an eternal
flame was lit at the Piskarevsky cemetery, and on May 8, 1967, an
eternal flame near the walls of the Moscow Kremlin. The project of a
granite square around the flame was created by the architect S. G.
Maiofis.
On November 14, 2003, after restoration, the monument to
the "Fighters of the Revolution" was reopened, the eternal flame was
again lit from the open-hearth furnace of the Kirov Plant.