Grieving angel

A proposal for the construction of such a monument appeared in 1999 from the city public organization “Victims of Political Repression”. In 2000, a competition was held for the best project of the memorial. A total of 5 applications were considered. The work of Igor Burmistenko won.

The monument was unveiled on October 30 on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression in 2005. However, they did not manage to make the figure of an angel by the opening, so a temporary, plaster version was installed. The bronze monument was erected only in April 2006. The monument is installed on the Veterans Avenue in the Central Park of Togliatti.

In total, 8 million rubles were spent on the construction of the monument, in equal shares allocated by the regional and city administrations.

The author of the idea was Niyaz Azizovich Yalymov, head of the Togliatti Society of Victims of Political Repression. The author of the sculpture is Igor Burmistenko, a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR and the Russian Federation, however, Burmistenko died in the five years of the monument’s construction, his work was completed by I. N. Prokopenko, a member of the Union of Artists of Russia and Ukraine, and V. A. Fomin was cast from bronze.

The memorial complex is a square, along the perimeter of which granite panels are installed. On one side is a bronze figure of a seated angel. In the hands of an angel is an open book with the words "Time to collect stones." The height of the figure is 2.8 m.

On the wall behind it are two granite slabs. On one excerpt from the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. On the other names are 171 residents of the Stavropol region who were sentenced to capital punishment for political reasons and subsequently rehabilitated.

In January 2007, the memorial complex was attacked by vandals. They smashed the ceiling lights and turned out the lampposts. Also, the monument was chosen by skateboarders to perform tricks.

The emergence of a new symbolic meaning of the sculpture of the Grieving Angel was served by a bus explosion that occurred on October 31, 2007 in the city of Tolyatti, which killed 8 people and injured 56 people. On October 31, 2007, the day after Memorial Day for victims of political repressions, a funeral rally was held at the Sorrowing Angel. While the scene of the tragedy was closed due to investigative actions, it was to the Angel, located not far from the scene of the explosion, that the townspeople came and put candles.

• Description of the Grieving Angel
• Opening of the monument on the website of the Togliatti City Hall
• An angel appeared in Togliatti (inaccessible link)
• The grieving angel is back in its place
• Monument desecrated
• What the grieving angel is sad about
• burning candles will be installed at the monument "The Sorrowing Angel" (inaccessible link)