In April 1995 in St. Petersburg, on Robespierre embankment, opposite the building of the infamous prison Crosses opened a monument dedicated to the memory of victims of political repression. Two bronze Sphinx, symbolizing the world-famous sphinxes on the University embankment of the city, are within a few metres in front of each other. Their faces side by side: one side facing the residential areas, young women, and from the prison and Neva – rotted to the bone of the skull. The body of the Sphinx is so extremely thin that through the skin clearly seen bones. Height of sculpture is about five feet, the height of the plinth is a little less than 20 cm bronze statues of the Authors – architects A. A. Vasiliev and V. B. Bugaev and winter palaces.

The site chosen for the monument, symbolic – prison Crosses in the years of political repressions became a place of detention for thousands of Leningraders. Tragic sculptures remind us that everything in this world is ephemeral, and often, happiness and sorrow, freedom and imprisonment, life and death are close to each person as they were close once millions of people who suffered and perished during the Stalinist terror.

Two-faced sphinxes mounted on marble pedestals. Between the sculptures – four granite block with a small opening, reminiscent of the barred window of a prison cell. On brass plaques on the perimeters of the pedestals are sealed from the works of poets, eminent artists, writers, or otherwise affected by the persecution of the authorities. Here are the lines from the works of Nikolai Gumilev, Vladimir Vysotsky, Anna Akhmatova, Daniel Andreev, Osip Mandelstam, Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Joseph Brodsky, Yuri Galanskov, Dmitry Likhachev. There are on the monument facsimile signature image of Raoul Wallenberg.

For people living in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, the twentieth century was a time of trial. The revolutionary turmoil, civil strife and terror, war, Stalinist purges crippled the lives of millions of people. Black band in the history of Russia marked 1937 and 1938, when the slightest suspicion, according to the first information without charge or trial were arrested almost 2 million Soviet citizens, of which 700 thousand people were shot. According to average estimates, every day in those years, the state has destroyed about a thousand of its innocent citizens. In subsequent years, the thinking in the Soviet Union were persecuted, but not on this scale, but thousands are in the number of political prisoners, and thousands, after a forced "treatment", ended his life in psychiatric hospitals.

In the early 1990-ies in several cities of the USSR was established memorable characters, which were replaced with monuments. St. Petersburg was one of the first cities in Russia that created such a memorial. To date work is underway to perpetuate the memory of those who died in the years of Stalinist repression. In Volgograd, Togliatti, Ufa, Novosibirsk, Barnaul and other cities of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova has the monuments to victims of political persecution. For the long years of archive research, Books of memory, in which are recorded the names of the innocent victims.

The St. Petersburg memorial to the victims of repression and political persecution – a symbol of memory nevinnomiisky.