https://cdnimg.rg.ru/img/content/190/91/96/memorial667_d_850.jpg

the Pandemic at the time postponed the opening, originally scheduled for Victory Day. Opened the memorial on June 30.

– Andrew, you only 33 years. To take on such a job, I think you have to be brave man…

– We architect Konstantin Fomin realized that the chances to win the competition a bit. Coast is not even thirty, and competitors venerable masters, people’s artists, architects…

I a little about other. Probably very difficult at your age skip the war through his soul…

It tough not only to us. After the first stage, all work was cancelled, none of the projects gave the jury. The main complaint is this – “not enough souls.” We knew that we must move away from Paphos, excessive pathos. But how? We had about 80 sketches and all – by. And at some point we came to the realization that the figure of the soldier is supposed to float in the air, as if to break up into parts. But how to do it? I clearly remember the day when it dawned on us: the souls of the fallen soldiers – these are the cranes from the film by Mikhail Kalatozov “the cranes are Flying”, a song by Jan Frenkel and Rasul Gamzatov.

And my soul… I now considered myself strong, but one day, weeping bitterly, and for some nights did not sleep. Only when our work began, with the Bones we brought to these places for the burial of the 72 soldiers who died in the Rzhev meat grinder. Search engines not only raised the remains of soldiers, but also tracked down relatives of one of them. And here is the granddaughter talks about her grandfather as a living person about how they sought him, they found 26 full namesakes and only four were known, how they died. The grandfather was the fifth. Tells how his train was passing by their home and grandfather asked the villager to call family, but while he was running, they were able to see only the tail of the departing train.

And then for me hundreds of thousands of victims has shrunk to the fate of one particular person who now lies in that coffin. And 75 years after the Victory – no matter how it happened. After all, if I had been in a while, the coffin could be mine. I burst out.

the War went through your family?

Three brother of my grandmother went to the front. There were many unusual stories. Michael was the commander of T-34, ended the war in Budapest. Went through the siege of Leningrad, there was in the hospital, in the care of a nurse who died of starvation. Then Michael found out that she was his ration he was feeding. All his life he tormented it.

Nicholas went missing, not a single letter has not come. I was working on the monument, sometimes thought that it is possible that in these places disappeared.

Third, Ivan, was fought a short time, in one of the first fights has received a contusion that was the reserve. I the soldier’s face at first wanted to do portraits of their grandfathers, but then I realized that I have no right to assign this image. We members of the Russian military-historical��of companies has provided a number of portraits of soldiers Rzhevsky events, and I have different persons take the individual parts – it is a collective image.

– Fomin – the architect, the sculptor, and the joint project. Had to argue?

– of Course. We’re doing the same thing. And Bones are old friends, in the hostel of the Academy of arts lived in the next room, the guitar strumming along. And decided to work together too, only winning projects we have about forty, and lost well over a hundred. So comradely, do not spare each other.

– Your parents will attend the opening of the monument?

– I Really want that. They live in Belgorod region, which also swept the war. I am grateful to them for the fact that once noticed my cravings for clay, went to art school. Dad, Sergei Petrovich – the welder for the GOK in Gubkin, mother, Lyudmila Alekseevna – engineer. In the family of artists was not. But one day I came home and brought a small booklet with their works – to report to parents. In the morning watch, the father went to work, from the bag and the pamphlet sticking out of his welders decided to show.

State Secretary of the Union state Grigory Rapota:

Is the monument to the soldier. Not Marshall, not the Admiral, not General. To those who paid with their lives for that there to hold a huge Armada of Germans, to give them the opportunity to go to Stalingrad, and there were such plans. Do not let them break through to Moscow or to withdraw its troops to the Caucasus. This is a huge sacrifice that paid the soldier’s life and monument to it.

June 6, 2017 at a meeting in the Russian military-historical society, it was decided to perpetuate the memory of those killed in the Rzhev battle, with the support of the Union state.

the memorial was the first major monument to the heroism of the Soviet soldier, created in modern Russia. In scale and significance it is in line with the world-famous complexes on the Mamaev Kurgan in Volgograd, “Defenders of the Soviet Arctic during the great Patriotic war” in the Murmansk region, on Poklonnaya hill in Moscow at the Piskaryovskoye memorial cemetery in St. Petersburg.

the memorial will receive the status of branch of the Museum of Victory. The project is implemented without attraction of means of the Federal budget. Public donations amounted to more than half a billion rubles, 200 million received from the Federal government.

Fighting the Soviet and German forces that took place in the area of the Rzhev-Vyazma bulge 5 January 1942 to 21 March 1943, with breaks of two weeks to three months, included four offensive, Soviet troops of the Western front and the Kalinin front against the German army group “Center”. The goal is to liberate the city of Rzhev, Sychivka, Vyazma and thus eliminate the Rzhev-Vyazma salient. All ended with the retreat of the 9th army of the Wehrmacht on March 5, 1943.

the loss of Soviet troops in these operations was, according to some estimates, up to 1 600 000 people, of them permanently (killed, died of wounds, missing and captured) – 392 554 people.