Monument to the Fighters of the Revolution

The Field of Mars was selected by the Petrograd Soviet as the site for the ceremonial burials of those who had died during the February Revolution, which had toppled the tsarist autocracy.

Large granite tablets at the end of each wall carried epitaphs by People's Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, extolling the virtues and sacrifices of those buried there.

Used for vegetable gardens and the site of artillery batteries during the siege of Leningrad, the name "Field of Mars" was restored in 1944, and the square was repaired after the war.

The central space of the memorial, which had been covered with a circular lawn and floral displays, was replaced with a paved square in the late 1950s, with the first eternal flame in Russia at the centre, lit in 1957.

Since the founding of the city, the space occupied by the Field of Mars had been at times the site of parks, pleasure gardens, festivities, and military parades.

[1] The Soviet initially selected Palace Square as the location for the graves but changed this to the Field of Mars after representations from prominent artists, including Maxim Gorky.

[1] Architects Yevgeny-Karl Schröter, Lev Rudnev, Sigizmund Dombrovsky [ru], and A. L. Shilovsky oversaw the preparations of four large L-shaped communal graves in the centre of the Field of Mars.

[3] Ultimately only 184 victims were buried on the Field of Mars, comprising 86 soldiers, 9 sailors, 2 officers, 32 workers, 6 women, 23 people for whom social status could not be determined, and 26 unknown dead.

[3][5] The graves had been prepared by blasting trenches in the frozen ground, with the lowering of each coffin marked by a cannon shot from the Peter and Paul Fortress.

[3] Following the funerals the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda carried pieces by leading party members Lev Kamenev and Alexandra Kollontai calling for the response to the deaths to be the securing and building of new freedoms in a democratic Russia.

[2][4][6] Modest in comparison to some of the proposals, it had the advantage at a time of straitened finances of re-using materials from the Salniy Buyan, a collection of storage yards and warehouses along the river Pryazhka [ru], which had been dismantled before the war as part of the expansion of the neighbouring shipyard.

[1][4][2][6] The design of the inscriptions was carried out by artists Vladimir Konashevich and Nikolai Tyrsa [ru], with the construction of the monument overseen by Lev Ilyin.

[1] Other interments that year included Moisei Uritsky, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka who was assassinated in August 1918, and Semyon Nakhimson, who was killed in the Yaroslavl Uprising in July 1918.

"[1][4] Individual burials continued over the next few years, with the Civil War commander A. S. Rakov in 1919 and All-Russian Central Executive Committee member Semyon Voskov [ru] in 1920.

Experts from the State Museum of Urban Sculpture [ru] carried out maintenance involving the preventative washing of the granite walls and plaques, and repairing the text of the inscriptions.