Battle of Stalingrad memorial gets facelift
Published 17 October, 2007, 06:41
Hundreds of people have gathered in the Russian city of Volgograd to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the world's biggest statues – ‘The Motherland’. The monument commemorates the fallen at the Battle of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) – one of the turning points of World War Two.
The first sketches of the gigantic statue were made by Soviet soldiers who survived the battle.
Engineer inspecting insides of the monument
Fifteen years later the construction of The Motherland statue began.
It was not built in sections, but up from the ground using concrete and metal.
“The shell of the statue is only 25 centimetres thick. In comparison to her total mass, it’s a kind of a skin on a human body. That’s why we used special cables to stop it from getting wrinkles, if you will,” said Evgeny Gavrilov, engineer, involved in the facelift.
Standing on Mamayev Kurgan – a hill where more than a thousand Soviet soldiers who died in the battle of Stalingrad are buried – it can be spotted from any point of the city.
It still attracts millions of visitors to Volgograd – a constant reminder of the enormous price the Soviet Union paid to defeat the Nazis during World War Two.
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