More than 44 million Russian rubles will be allocated for the reconstruction of the monument to the Heroes of the War of 1812 in Polotsk

September 9, Minsk / Zhanna Kotlyarova - BELTA /. More than 44 million Russian rubles will be allocated for the reconstruction of the monument to the Heroes of the War of 1812 in Polotsk. This was reported to a BELTA correspondent by Lyudmila Kurilovich, a specialist expert of the Department of Social Policy and Information Support of the Standing Committee of the Union State. The financing of the works will be carried out from the budget of the Union State and partly from local budgets in Belarus. The project has already been developed, and restoration work will begin soon. The opening of the monument is planned for the 200th anniversary of the victory in the Patriotic War of 1812. The monument to the Heroes of 1812 was opened in Polotsk in 1850. The author of the project was architect Fiksen. The monument was a pyramid topped with a dome with a gilded cross. Around it stood 8 cast-iron columns with domes, on which gilded eagles sat. All this rested on a cylindrical pedestal. The height of the monument was 23.7 m, and the total weight reached 221 tons. In the 1930s, it was destroyed. The same fate befell the monument near Borodino; only the monument in Smolensk has survived to this day. Also, 19,853 thousand Russian rubles are to be allocated from the Union budget for the creation of a memorial complex in the city of Smorgon along the line of confrontation of 1915-1917 in World War I. The city was completely destroyed by German artillery. The 810-day struggle in 1915-1917 for the small Belarusian town of Smorgon is compared to the struggle of besieged Leningrad. The initiative to create the monuments was put forward by the commission of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia for Social Policy, Science, Culture and Humanitarian Issues, the Ministry of Culture of Belarus, and local executive authorities in Belarus. The proposal to create these monuments was supported by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Moscow Patriarchate, the State Secretariat of the Security Council of the Republic of Belarus, the Belarusian Public Association of Veterans, the Grodno Regional Executive Committee, the Smorgon District Executive Committee, and the Polotsk City Executive Committee. -0-