Memorial to the Victims of Political Repression (Russian: Памятник жертвам политических репрессий, «Метафизические сфинксы») in Saint Petersburg is a monument dedicated to millions of people who suffered from state terror in the USSR.

The central element of the monument to the victims of political repression is a pair of bronze sculptures, "metaphysical sphinxes", which are mirror-symmetrically created by the artist Mikhail Shemyakin.

Their bodies are emaciated, with ribs protruding on the animal torsos, thin necks exaggeratedly and anxiously stretched, and below, at the junction of the lion and human parts, expressive female breasts are located.

[4] As noted by critic Tatiana Voltskaya, "two-faced images symbolize life and death, freedom and slavery, as well as the duality of human nature, capable of rising to spiritual heights, as well as descending to mass murders and the destruction of entire peoples".

[6][7][8] Mikhail Shemyakin, who often explored the theme of the "cosmic-omniscient masquerade" and the mask of death as its central component,[6][9] according to Victor Krivulin, introduced into the monument "elements of a certain modern tragic travesty and seemingly exposed the bloody-carnival underpinning of the idea of tyrannical power, the subconscious nature of dictatorship, which pushed a large part of Russia to the brink of life and death".

[3] Art historian Mikhail Zolotonosov noted the plastic expressiveness and meaningfulness of the sculptures of sphinxes, seeing in them "the concept of death, greedily and eagerly rushing upon a person, desiring him, full of eternal thirst for life".

[11] Human rights activist Veniamin Iofe saw in the sphinxes a self-reflection of the authorities, "obvious tension of thought and desire to penetrate into the state subconscious", personification of guards-executioners and dictatorship.

[12] The artist-postmodernist Mikhail Shemyakin proclaimed in his work the principle of "metaphysical synthesis", which involved the creation of new forms and iconography based on the study of cult art from various countries and epochs.

Art historians see parallels between the sphinxes and Soviet Russia with its totalitarian dictatorship, cults of personalities like Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev, mass slave labor, and repression.

According to him, it starts with the sphinxes on University Embankment, located opposite Senate Square, where the Decembrist Uprising occurred in 1825, foreshadowing the empire's future collapse.

According to Viktor Krivulin, such a size of the figures, which somewhat does not correspond to the scale of the embankment, was a deliberate gesture of rejecting megalomania in favor of humanizing the monument's image.

[20] In the middle of the embankment's parapet, there is a structure made of four granite blocks, which are arranged in such a way as to form the shape of an early Christian cross with a small hole in the center.

[5] Researcher Alexander Etkind notes that the symbolism of the cross is one of the most common in the iconography of monuments to victims of political repression in Russia: this language allows expressing grief for the killed (although it does not reveal the circumstances of death and crime).

[3][12] Also nearby (4 Liteyny Avenue) stands the "Bolshoy Dom", built in the early 1930s as the residence of the authorities responsible for the terror of the NKVD-KGB (now the building is occupied by their successor, the FSS).

According to urban legend, the blood of those killed in the basements of this building flowed into the Neva through sewage pipes, coloring the river water red.

In the late 1980s, a significant amount of information about political repressions became public knowledge, but the burial sites of their victims remained a secret.

For this reason, starting from 1988, citizens began to float flowers on the water on the first Saturday of June in memory of the killed whose graves are unknown, from the embankment between the "Bolshoy Dom" and the Kresty prison.

Etkind interprets this as evidence of the absence of socio-political consensus in society regarding the memory of state terror, as well as the inheritance of Soviet power by the current authorities.

[3][31] Around the perimeter of the bronze pedestals of Shemyakin's sphinxes, a series of copper plaques are attached, on which lines from the works of Varlam Shalamov, Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Zabolotsky, Daniil Andreev, Dmitry Likhachov, Joseph Brodsky, Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Vysotsky, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Andrei Sakharov are engraved.

These texts constitute a kind of "anthology" of the monument on the theme of political repression in the USSR, all of them created by people who suffered from them in one way or another and fought against them.

[2] Critics highlight the monument on Voskresenskaya Embankment as one of the most well-known and significant memorials to the victims of political repression in Russia, alongside the Solovetsky Stones in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the Mask of Sorrow in Magadan, and others.

However, according to researcher Alexander Etkind and Italian historian Maria Ferretti, due to the lack of consensus in society and the government regarding the assessment of state terror in the USSR, this monument, like all similar ones, has a "marginal" character, not fully revealing or addressing all aspects of the tragic Soviet history.

Initially, he wanted to create a large-scale composition of sphinxes five meters high surrounded by allegorical figures, embodying, for example, the poet Alexander Blok and the simple-minded The Man with the Gun Nikolai Pogodin.

Critics pointed out that the monument was hastily created, exclusively at the whim of officials, bypassing the artistic council, open competition, and public discussion, including organizations of former political prisoners and the commission for the restoration of the rights of rehabilitated victims of repression.

In April 2001, on Hitler's birthday, the monument suffered significant damage: vandals toppled the central part from the granite parapet of the embankment.

[5][41] During the summer, the granite book was pried off and stolen from the central part of the memorial[42][43] In these instances, reconstruction of the monument proved to be a significant challenge as it had not been transferred to the city's balance sheet, but it was eventually repaired.

[44][45] In 2020, the book was stolen again but was quickly replaced[46] Traditionally, on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, flowers are laid at the memorial.

[47] In 2017, it became one of the points of the "Pelevinu55" campaign aimed at drawing attention to Russia's literary heritage[48] In 2019, on the day of the murders of Markelov and Baburova, antifascists, left-wing activists, and democratic movements staged an unauthorized march, in which several hundred people participated, from Chernyshevskaya metro station to the sphinxes, where they laid flowers.

Speakers at the memorial expressed their opposition to torture in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Federal Penitentiary Service system, as well as in defense of the defendants in the "Network" case.