The monument to Nadezhda Krupskaya is located on Sretensky Boulevard in Moscow. It’s made as a standing female figure draped with fabric. Behind the figure are two 10-meter pylons on which the dates of life and quotes from her speeches are inscribed.
The monument itself and the pylons are bronze. The base is granite.
Authors: sculptors E. F. Belashova, A. M. Belashov, architect – V. L. Voskresensky.
The monument was inaugurated on June 1, 1976, International Children’s Day. This place for installation was not chosen by chance. Near to the monument, on Sretensky Boulevard in the house of the insurance company Russia from 1921 to 1925, the People’s Commissariat of Education was located, where, as deputy people’s commissar, Krupskaya worked to create the Soviet system of public education.
In 2002, the restoration of the monument was conducted.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was a Russian revolutionary and the wife of Vladimir Lenin.
Krupskaya was born in Saint Petersburg to an aristocratic family that had descended into poverty, and she developed strong views about improving the lives of the poor. She embraced Marxism and met Lenin at a Marxist discussion group in 1894. Both were arrested in 1896 for revolutionary activities. After Lenin was exiled to Siberia, Krupskaya was allowed to join him in 1898 on the condition that they marry. The two settled in Munich and then London after their exile before briefly returning to Russia to participate in the failed Revolution of 1905.
Following the 1917 Revolution, Krupskaya was at the forefront of the political scene, becoming a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1924. From 1922 to 1925, she was aligned with Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev against Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition. She was deputy education commissar from 1929 to 1939, strongly influencing the Soviet educational system and developing Soviet librarianship.
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