Monument to Sergey Kirov on Kirovskaya Ploshchad

Surrounded by some of the best examples of early Soviet architecture in St. Petersburg this enormous monument (over 15 meters tall) to Sergey Kirov, the prominent Bolshevik administrator and head of the Communist Party in St. Petersburg from 1926 until his assassination in December 1934.

Kirov was famed as an orator, who in his first year in Leningrad made over 180 speeches at workers' meetings, and responsible for rapid and wide-scale industrial development in the city, so it is fitting that his monument should stand in the heart of the traditionally working class south-west region of St. Petersburg, close to the enormous machine-building and armaments factory renamed in his honour, Kirovskiy Zavod.

The monument, which was completed in 1938, was designed by the sculptor Nikolay Tomskiy and the famous architect Noy Trotskiy, who was also responsible for the impressive Kirovskiy District Soviet Building (1935) on the eastern side of Kirovskaya Ploshchad. In typically grandiose socialist realist style, the monument shows Kirov in a declamatory pose on a bulky granite pedestal decorated with friezes depicting the Civil War, the Socialist Race, and the Joyous Path, as well as a panel with quotations from Kirov's speeches.