This is a very strange and a truly post-Soviet, post-modernist monument. Hybrid art.

The monument is dedicated to hundreds of thousands who perished in “the meat grinder of Rzhev” - an excruciatingly long episode of the war, which the Soviets preferred to forget. Many if not most of these soldiers are still waiting to be found and properly buried.

The flock of cranes in place of a pedestal refers to a famous song based on a poem by Dagestani/Soviet poet Rasul Gamzatov: “I sometimes feel that soldiers who never returned from the blood-soaked fields didn’t not fall into this soil, but turned into white cranes”

Here is the song as originally performed by Mark Bernes