In April 1995, in St. Petersburg, on Robespierre, in front of the infamous prison crosses it opened the monument dedicated to the memory of victims of political repression. Two bronze sphinxes symbolizing the world famous Sphinx on the University Embankment of the city, located a few meters in front of each other. Their faces are separated vertically: on the one side facing the living quarters, young women, and from the prison and the Neva - rotten to the bone of the skull. Torso sphinxes are thin so highly that clearly show through the skin bones. The sculpture about fifteen meters, the height of the plinth slightly less than 20 cm. The authors of bronze sculptures - AA Architects Vasilyev VB Buha and sculptor MM Shemyakin.

The place chosen for the monuments, symbolic - Kresty prison in the years of political repressions became a place of detention for thousands of Leningrad. The tragic sculptures remind us that everything in this world is ephemeral, and often, happiness and sorrow, freedom and captivity, life and death are close to each person as well as they were close once millions of people injured and killed during the Stalinist terror.

Two-faced sphinxes mounted on marble pedestals. Between the sculptures - the four granite blocks with a small opening, reminiscent of the barred window of a prison cell. On the brass plate on the perimeter line pedestals sealed from the works of poets, prominent cultural figures, novelists, anyway affected by the persecution of the authorities. There is a line from the works of Nikolai Gumilev, Vladimir Vysotsky, Anna Akhmatova, Daniel Andreev, Osip Mandelstam, Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Nicholas Z's, Joseph Brodsky, Yuri Galanskov, Dmitry Likhachev. There on the monument facsimile signature of Raoul Wallenberg.

For living in pre-revolutionary Russia, and then in the Soviet Union, XX century was a time of serious trials. The revolutionary upheaval, civil strife and terror, war, Stalin's purges crippled the fate of millions of people. Black bands in the history of Russia awarded 1937 and 1938 years when on the slightest suspicion, the first denunciation without trial were arrested nearly 2 million Soviet citizens, of which 700 thousand were shot. On average estimated daily in those years the state has destroyed about a thousand of his or innocent citizens. In subsequent years, freedom of thought in the USSR persecuted, but not on such a scale, but a thousand people were among the political prisoners, but thousands, after the forced "treatment", ended his life in psychiatric hospitals.

In the early 1990s in a number of cities of the USSR were established memorials, which eventually were replaced by monuments. St. Petersburg was one of the first cities in Russia, created a similar memorial. Until now, work is under way, designed to perpetuate the memory of those killed during the Stalinist repression. In Volgograd, Togliatti, Ufa, Novosibirsk, Barnaul and many other cities of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, there are monuments to the victims of political persecution. Over the years, many archival searches collected books of memory, which included the names of innocent people affected.

St. Petersburg memorial to victims of repression and political persecution - a symbol of memory nevinnoubiennyh.