Monument to Victims of Political Repressions set at Voskresenskaya Embankment in St. Petersburg has been partially destroyed.
One of the granite stones in the monument base was broken out from its slot and left turned upside down next to the monument. The remaining parts of the sculpture composition, such as a barbed wire wreath, a stone book and two bronze sphinxes created by the sculptor Mikhail Shemyakin were not damaged.
Bronze tables with the names of Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolay Zabolotsky, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were kept intact.
One of the bronze tables in the sphinx pedestal has inscription with Andrei Sakharov's words: “… I hope that, having overcome dangers and having reached great development in all the areas of life, the mankind will manage to keep up the human in the human being”.
Author: Vera Ivanova