In the district of Turukhansk, Krasnoyarsk region, the former pantheon in memory of Josef Stalin is supposed to be reconstructed. The regional administration confirmed that this project is based on” purely commercial motives – without any political reasons behind”.
According to a communication of the “Interfaks” news agency, the counselor of regional governor Aleksander Khloponin, Yevgeniy Pashchenko, discussed this issue during a round-table conference about the development of tourism within the region. “The initiative comes from a number of businessmen, who have already been working on the touristic sector since long. It is a purely commercial project, which is to attract tourists. There are no political motives at all”, the counselor expressly pointed out.
The Pantheon was built in the settlement of Kureyka in the middle of the past century. It represented a monumental concstruction covering an area of 400 square meters. The entire composition included Stalin’s life-size statue. The Pantheon was closed in 1961. In 1995 the remains (the building had already ecayed for the most part) was completely destroyed by fire. The Pantheon is now going to be reconstructed with the help of photographies taken at that time, as well as drawings.
Let us recall that in August 2005 the town council of Zheleznogorsk (Krasnoyarsk egion) decided to put up a Stalin bust on the territory of the local Museum and Exhibition Center. Due to thelack of financial means the realization of this idea came to nothing. Shortly before, the Krasnoyarsk towns’s committee of the Communist Party had made preparations for the putting up of a Stalin statue by falling back upon their own means. The statue was to be erected inside the Victory Memorial, which had just been partly restored before the celebrations on the occasion of Victory Day on the 9 May 2005. The intention was to place Stalin’s bust inside the memorial, together with sculptures of other politically and militarily prominent figures of the Great Patriotic War. On the eve of the opening of the complex, however, the governor of the region – Khloponin, and the mayor of Krasnoyarsk – Petr Pimashkov, declared against the putting up of the generalissmo’s statue. They did not even give their permission to erect it inside the memorial building. As a token of their protest against this decision the Communists then presented the bust on the 6 May, right in front of the building of the town’s committee of the Communist Party on Markovskiy Street. It kept standing there for about five hours. Then it was taken away by the Communists themselves, as they feared possible acts of vandalism.
19.04.06 / GZT.ru