The Motherland Calls

Start with the steps. The granite is pale and worn smooth, and the climb is steady rather than steep. Around you the wind moves across an open hill above the Volga. Then you lift your eyes. A woman of concrete rises over the slope, one arm thrown back, a long sword raised toward the sky. She seems to be shouting across the whole city.

This is The Motherland Calls, the central figure of the memorial complex on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd. When the battle took place here, the city had another name. It was Stalingrad. The fighting on this hill and in the streets below became one of the turning points of the Second World War. The statue stands on a place where an enormous number of soldiers died. It is a monument, and it is also something close to a grave.

The word kurgan means a burial mound. It is a term from the steppe peoples who lived along the Volga long before Russia existed. Mamayev Kurgan was already old ground, a rise of land with a wide view over the river. On Soviet military maps it was marked simply as Height 102. That view is the reason soldiers fought for it so hard. Whoever held the top could watch the river crossings and much of the city.

The Battle of Stalingrad began in the summer of 1942 and ended in February 1943. For months, control of this hill changed hands again and again. Soldiers fought for trenches, for craters, and sometimes for a few metres of slope. Accounts from after the battle describe ground so full of metal fragments that it was almost part of the soil. Locals often say that the grass did not grow here the following spring. Whether that is exactly true or not, it shows how people remember this place.

The memorial you are walking through was built long after the guns stopped. It opened in 1967. The lead sculptor was Yevgeny Vuchetich, an artist known for large Soviet war memorials. The engineering problem belonged to Nikolai Nikitin, the same structural engineer who worked on the Ostankino television tower in Moscow. Their task was hard. They had to make a giant figure that looked full of movement, and still keep it standing in the strong winds of the steppe.

Here is the first surprise. The statue is not fixed to its base with bolts or anchors. It stands on its foundation by its own weight. Inside, the concrete shell is hollow and held in tension by steel cables, a little like the strings inside a tennis racket. This system keeps the thin walls rigid. Engineers have monitored the figure for decades, because a structure this tall and this slender moves slightly in the wind.

The figure is very large. Together with the sword, the total height is usually given as about eighty-five metres. When it was finished, it was described as the tallest statue in the world, and for a long time it was the tallest in Europe. From the base, you cannot really take in the whole figure at once. Walk around her slowly. Her face, her open mouth, and her flowing robe change as your angle changes.

Now the second surprise — the sword is not the original one. The first blade was made of stainless steel with a titanium covering. In strong wind it swayed and made a metallic sound, and this put stress on the arm. In the early 1970s it was replaced with a sword made fully of steel. The new blade has openings near its top, which reduce the force of the wind. Look up at the tip and you may see them.

The Motherland Calls is also one part of a larger story told in three monuments. In the Ural city of Magnitogorsk, a sculpture shows a worker handing a sword to a soldier. That is where the weapon is forged. Here, on the Volga, the Motherland raises the sword and calls her people to fight. In Treptower Park in Berlin, a Soviet soldier lowers his sword over a broken swastika. Read together, the three show the sword going from the factory, to the front, to the end of the war.

On your way up the hill, you pass a series of spaces with their own atmosphere. There are walls carved to look like ruined buildings, covered in figures of fighting soldiers and fragments of text. There is a large figure of a bare-chested soldier with a grenade and a gun, rising out of the water of a pool. There is also a quiet square with a mother bending over her dead son. Many visitors walk faster on the stairs and slower in these places.

Before the final climb, go inside the Hall of Military Glory. It is a round hall, dim and cool after the open hill. In the centre, a giant stone hand holds a torch with an eternal flame. The walls carry the names of soldiers who died at Stalingrad, set in rows on red banners. Soft music often plays. A guard of honour stands here, and the changing of the guard is a slow, formal ceremony that many people stop to watch.

The hill is also a cemetery in the plain sense. Many soldiers are buried in mass graves on these slopes. Marshal Vasily Chuikov, who commanded the Soviet army that defended the city, asked to be buried here among his soldiers, and his grave is on the kurgan. Local families come here on anniversaries and on holidays. Newly married couples in Volgograd often bring flowers to the memorial on their wedding day. It is a living place of remembrance, not only a site for visitors.

Before you leave, stand at the foot of the statue and turn around. Look out over the Volga, wide and grey or blue depending on the day. Look at the modern city below, with its apartment blocks, roads, and trains. All of it was rebuilt from ruins. Then look back up at her raised sword, still pointing west. As you walk down the steps, notice the sound of the wind, the quiet voices around you, and the flowers left at the edges of the stone.