At the foot of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, next to the church of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist is a monument to the leaders of the national militia in 1612 - Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky. The monumental building was erected in November 2005 and is a miniature copy of the Moscow monument with one exception - the absence of specified year of installation.

The history of the monument began in 1803 when members of the Free Society of Sciences, Arts and Letters received a proposal to start collecting money to build a monument to national heroes 1612 .  The original monument to be installed near Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, where he was raised militia Zemsky elder Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky against Polish-Lithuanian invaders .  In 1807, the sculptor Ivan Martos publishes the first engraving of the obelisk and in 1808 won the competition for the best project of the monument .  Project approval by the Emperor Alexander, and interest in the creation of the monument, after the war of 1812 reinforces the importance of the idea to the national scale .  In 1818 the decision to establish a monument in the main square of Moscow .  In Nizhny Novgorod, as compensation in the main square was set obelisk with gilded bronze images of national heroes . 

After almost two hundred years of inequity in Nizhny Novgorod has been corrected on the initiative of the mayor of Moscow. In 2005, close to a Christmas church with the porch which in 1611 called Nizhny Novgorod Kuzma Minin protect Moscow from the Poles, has been installed a copy of the Moscow monument Zurab Tsereteli. In a relatively short period of time attraction Nizhny Novgorod gained popularity among Russian and foreign tourists, becoming part of the history of the city. Just above the monument, between the walls of the Kremlin and the temple was set the alarm bell, completing the picture of the old historic Nizhny Novgorod.