Alyosha Monument

Climb the hill on the eastern side of Murmansk and stop when the figure comes into full view. A soldier stands high above you, taller than a ten-story building. His long coat falls in heavy folds of concrete. A gun rests on his shoulder. His face is calm and serious. People here call him simply Alyosha.

Alyosha is a common, friendly name in Russia, the kind of name a mother might call her son. The soldier himself has no single real name. He stands for all the men who defended this region during the Second World War. In Russia that war is called the Great Patriotic War. Here in the far north, the fighting was hard, and it was bitterly cold.

Look carefully at the direction the soldier faces. He looks to the west. He is watching the Valley of Glory, the place where the worst fighting happened. In July 1941 German forces tried to take Murmansk. They were stopped near the Zapadnaya Litsa River, not far from the city. They pushed and pushed, but they never reached the streets below.

Murmansk mattered greatly in that war. It was a northern port that stayed open through the fighting. Ships from allied countries brought supplies and weapons through these freezing waters. The enemy bombed the city again and again, and much of the old wooden town was burned. Still the port kept working, and the people held on.

The statue is large beyond easy belief. The figure alone rises about 35.5 metres. It stands on a base of about 7 metres more. Only one statue in all of Russia is taller, The Motherland Calls in the city of Volgograd. The soldier is hollow inside, and even so he weighs more than five thousand tons. When you stand at his feet, your head barely reaches past his boots.

The monument was opened on October 19, 1974. The date marked thirty years since German forces were finally driven out of the Soviet Arctic. Crowds gathered on the hill for the ceremony. For the people of Murmansk, many of whom still remembered the war themselves, this was a deep and personal day, not only an official one.

Walk to the foot of the monument. An eternal flame burns here on the ground. Its fire is never allowed to go out. In 1975 the body of an unknown soldier was brought here and buried beside the flame. He has no name either, and so he stands for every soldier whose name was lost in the fighting.

Two capsules are sealed into the base of the monument. One holds seawater. It was taken from the place where the small patrol ship Tuman went down while fighting three enemy destroyers at once. The other holds earth, gathered from the Valley of Glory and from the Verman River front. In this way the ground and the sea of the battle are kept here with the soldier.

Now turn around and look out. From this open hill you can see much of Murmansk spread out below. The long Kola Bay stretches away toward the distant sea. Tall cranes line the working port. Gray apartment blocks climb the far slopes. The wide view shows you, better than any words, why this place was worth defending.

The wind is often strong up here. It comes straight off the water and pulls hard at your coat. In winter the daylight is thin and very short. In summer the sun does not set for weeks, and the soldier glows pale through the bright Arctic night. He stands through all of it, in every season, never moving.

Local people come here often, not only on holidays. Newly married couples drive up on their wedding day to have their photographs taken. Families bring flowers on days of remembrance. Small children look up at the giant and ask their parents who he is. The monument is woven into ordinary life, not kept only for visitors from outside.

If you come on the ninth of May, the day Russia marks the end of the war, you will find the hill crowded. People carry flowers and old photographs of relatives who fought. Veterans, fewer each year, are helped up the slope. The mood is solemn and proud at the same time.

Stand beside Alyosha for a while before you go. Feel the wind and watch the bay far below. The soldier does not speak. He only watches the west, year after year, guarding a city that was bombed and burned but never taken.