The glow of someone else’s glory

The Russian government has offered to the Ukrainian government to transfer the Glory Monument from Poltava to St. Petersburg. This monument is one of the noted monuments glorifying Russia’s victory in the Battle of Poltava. In Ukraine the attitude to this battle varies, so the monument should be transferred to St. Petersburg to preserve this remarkable architectural site.

At all times and in all countries monuments have served as carriers of a certain ideology. In addition, they symbolize belonging to a given country, reflect its historical traditions, and honor its heroes. Empires erected monuments on annexed territories that embodied the idea of their power. The state idea would be expressed through the eulogizing of the image of the monarch (in the case of Russia it was Peter I), the idea of unity of the monarchy, the state, and the people. In Russia the process of enhancing national ideals through the glorification of past heroes and historic events resulted in the emergence, in the 19th century, of a new kind of monuments that conveyed Russia’s official ideology to the masses, instilling the kind of understanding of the past the imperial government required.

To actually deprive the Ukrainians of their national future, the powers that be had to declare the historical identity of the Little and Great Russians. In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, monuments were built in the Ukrainian lands that were part of the Russian empire, intended to eulogize the past in its Russian imperial interpretation and propagandize only Russian historical prospects. It all started with the construction of the Glory Monument in 1805–11, commemorating Russia’s victory in the Battle of Poltava.

Administrative buildings and gubernia and city educational establishments were located around Poltava’s main square with the Column of Triumph topped by a double eagle in the center. This way Poltava, a gubernia center, turned into a symbol of tsarist autocracy’s victory over “unstable Little Russia.” The double eagle had to remind one and all who was the boss.

And now a bit of history. The first downtown blueprints envisaging the Glory Monument on Trade Square (today: Theater Square) were drawn up in 1783. A memorial plaque was installed on June 6, 1804. Administrative buildings were planned to appear on Cathedral Square and Trade Square, but then the plans changed.

A letter from Governor General Kurakin to the Minister of the Interior of May 27, 1805 reads: “I think that the grandeur of this monument, originally planned to be built on Trade Square [in front] of the Inn, implies its placement on the main oval city square that will be adorned with two major paired buildings.” Alexander I of Russia supported Kurakin’s initiative. The governor general of Poltava, after receiving 400,000 rubles’ worth of budget appropriations, purchased a parcel of land, namely the hay and tar marketplace. It was thus a circle with 345 meters in diameter was formed in a field in the northwestern suburb and the construction of the monument in its geometric center began in 1805.

On May 9, 1805, Alexander I signed an edict that legitimized the construction of the monument and made Governor General Kurakin personally responsible for the project. The construction of the monument was supervised by the gubernia’s architect Mykhailo Amvrosymov, who made the first two designs. The first of the two was a large column on an ashlar pedestal on a small elevated platform surrounded by a cast-iron balustrade with pillars topped by balls. Compositions with battle trophies were to be installed on four sides of the pedestal, at the foot of the column. Crowned with a double eagle, the column was to have a stripe twining around it with alabaster bas-reliefs in between depicting scenes from the Battle of Poltava. However, this design was not approved.

Then Amvrosymov made another design that retained the original compositional principles, with a smooth column on a cube-shaped granite pedestal with chamfered corners. The same bronze compositions with trophies were to be at the foot of the column, while the sides of the pedestal were to accommodate bas-reliefs portraying stacks of weapons twined round with a laurel wreath and a coiled serpent. An inscription indicating the date of the historic event was to be made inside the coil. The monument’s granite foundation had a stairway with semicircular ends to hold cannons and with a grating on top.

In the end, the St. Petersburg architect Jean-Fran ois Thomas de Thomon’s design was approved. He improved the monument’s proportions and lent the structure the shape of a terraced fortress with grates having sword-shaped bars, introduced sculptural decorations, transferred the bas-reliefs from the pedestal to the foot of the column, and improved the column’s architectural expressiveness by altering its proportion and the scale of the base. Moscow architects I. Gordeev and I. Martos took part in the construction project. The architect Fedor Shchedrin was hired to do the sculptural ornaments. Thomas de Thomon’s disciple, stonemason Leopold Carlani, supervised the construction works.

The Glory Monument is a cast-iron column on a cubic granite base supported by a terraced quadrilateral-bastion-shaped block of stylobate with 18 cannons mounted in the foundation (ten from the Poltava fortress and eight from the Perevolochna fortress). The upper plane is fenced off by a cast-iron balustrade whose pillars are shaped like sheathed swords aimed at the ground, symbolizing the end of hostilities. The sides of the bases are adorned with bronze high reliefs with Roman military elements.

On the southeastern side in the center of the composition are large bronze circles shaped like coiled vipers gripping their tails. The date of the Battle of Poltava, “27 June 1709,” is in a circle on the southeastern side. On the opposite side the inscription reads: “Completed in 1809.” However, the monument was unveiled on June 27, 1811. The column is made of bricks and covered with four cast-iron jackets, with the seams covered with three oak-leaf-wreath-shaped belts. The column is topped by a hemisphere with a bronze gilded double eagle holding thunderbolts in his claws and a laurel wreath in his beak, facing the site of the Battle of Poltava.

There was a brass memorial plaque that has not survived the ravages of time. The inscription read: “To the Glory of the Lord, in memory of the victory won by Peter the Great of Russia over Charles XII of Sweden on June 27, 1709, on this site in Poltava. This monument was founded by Governor General Prince Kurakin under the blessed reign of His Merciful Majesty Emperor Alexander I on June 27, 1804.” The column and the capital are 10.35 meters in height; the eagle with the hemisphere, 2.1 meters. The eagle’s wingspread is some 1.30 meters and the stylobate block is 12.2 by 12.2 meters.

The monument’s bronze decorations were cast as designed by Fedor Shchedrin, at Alexander I’s expense. The high reliefs in the bronze composition of the base depict elements of the coat of arms of Poltava gubernia under Alexander I, which clearly convey the idea of Muscovite revenge. The coat of arms is designed and described as follows: “A black triangle on a golden shield adorned with a golden coiled viper, with two green flags behind the monument with Tsar Peter I’s golden crowned monograms, and red shafts and spear blades; all this is crowned with two crossed swords.” This coat of arms clearly portrays the events at Poltava under Peter I — in other words, the Battle of Poltava won by Russia, which is symbolized, as usual, with military symbols (flags, swords, and spears) and the destruction of the Ukrainian state, which is symbolized by the viper.

Depicted on two sides of the Glory Monument is a viper gripping its tail. Without doubt, it also symbolizes Hetman Ivan Mazepa and his “betrayal.” That the viper in the Poltava coat of arms represents Mazepa is evidenced by the age-old Russian tradition of symbolically portraying the hateful hetman precisely in this way. Pushkin acidly asks in his poem Poltava, “… now where is Mazepa? Where is this villain / Who fled from bites of venom of his viper’s conscience?…” Another equally expressive image of Mazepa in the form of a serpent created during the reign of Peter I was in an alley of the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg. There were two small marble statues. One was entitled “Tearing Apart the Lion’s Jaws” and the other — “Tearing Apart the Serpent.”

The first statue portrayed Samson tearing the lion apart, which symbolized Russia’s victory over Sweden in the Battle of Poltava on St. Samson’s Day, June 27. The other statue was an allegory illustrating the “miserable lot of Mazepa the traitor,” who was depicted as a snake.

Take the Monument to Peter I (also known as the Bronze Horseman) in St. Petersburg and these lines from Zinaida Gippius’ poem written during the first Russian revolution:

Your bronze serpent still
slithers and coils,
Above it your bronze horse
is getting cold.
The all-cleansing
victorious fire
Will never devour you…

The hoofs of Peter I’s horse in Falconet’s monument are crashing the bronze viper, the symbol of Mazepa’s “betrayal.” Not surprisingly, symbols portraying Mazepa found their reflection also in Poltava’s coat of arms, which is historically associated with the victory in the Battle of Poltava and with Ivan Mazepa.

The allegorical image of a snake eating itself and swallowing its own tail was generally interpreted as an expression of envy and greed. Therefore, the “self-devouring” serpent in the Poltava’s coat of arms could not be intended to symbolize eternity, as claimed by some historians who specialize in heraldry. Since time immemorial, maybe since the dawn of culture, eternity has had its own graphic expression and emblem: a complete circle.

This is simple and very convincing symbol was inherited by Christianity, which used circles in the blueprints of rotunda-shaped temples, halos around saints’ heads, and other religious objects. Later, a ring became a symbol of eternity.

Therefore, the symbol of self-devouring snake in the Glory Monument was intended nto portray Mazepa’s “betrayal,” the more so that it was also a convenient traditional reason for getting even with Russia’s historical enemies by humiliating them even in the wrong place. It should be noted that in 1654 Bohdan Khmelnytsky presented Poltava with a coat of arms that consisted of a golden bow with an arrow pointing downward in a glazed field, with four golden stars at the corners of the shield. There was no self-devouring serpent.

Ukrainian national dignity demands that this humiliating, forcefully imposed symbol that is totally alien to the country be rejected. Therefore, a different, worthy emblem must be created for the land of Poltava by Ukrainian heraldry experts.

The construction of the Glory Monument, which came to dominate the Alexanderplatz (Oval Square), marked the creation of an ensemble in Poltava in the style of Russian classicism. This is Ukraine’s most outstanding classicist ensemble. It is unique also for being a successful synthesis of abstract designs of the Moscow architect A. Zakharkov and local architecture.

The Ems Ukase of 1876 divided contemporary Ukrainian intelligentsia into two camps—the supporters of “single and indivisible Russia” and Ukrainian patriots. The latter did not constitute a strong material force, but their idea was big enough to live on its own, attracting an increasing number of exponents. Under the circumstances the government used monuments as a weapon against unwelcome public attitudes and national aspirations among Ukrainians. This met with resistance on the part of the most radical intellectuals. The Glory Monument was first damaged in 1872. V. Suchnevych writes in his Notes on Poltava and Its Monuments (Poltava, 1902) that in 1872 a “ the brass plates were torn off the monument by some ‘devotee of culture,’ so the damage had to be camouflaged by artificial ornament during the festivities commemorating the 200th jubilee of Peter the Great.”

I think it must have been the first act of resistance against the idea of national oppression of the Ukrainian people in Poltava.

Anatolii Chernov is the chairman of Poltava’s regional Association of Tour Guides and a recipient of the title “Honored Worker of Tourism of Ukraine.”