Monument to Fellow Countrymen Who Went to the Front

The monument "To Fellow Countrymen Who Went to the Front" stands in Ufa on the station square, opposite the main entrance of the railway station on Vokzalnaya Street. A sculptural group of nine figures shows a send-off to the front in the summer of 1941 and is dedicated to the people of Bashkortostan who left from here for the Great Patriotic War.

History of the monument at Ufa station

The memorial was unveiled on 22 June 2020, the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, the anniversary of the start of the war. The idea came from Andrey Nazarov, then First Deputy Prime Minister of the republic, who also paid for the bronze figures out of his own pocket. A team of authors led by the sculptor Vadim Kirillov worked on the project for more than two years.

The site was chosen for a reason. Hundreds of thousands of local people left Ufa station for the front to the march "Farewell of the Slavic Woman". Bashkir, Russian, Tatar, Chuvash and Mari songs were heard on the platform as fathers, husbands, sons and daughters set off, believing they would come home with the Victory.

Until the 1990s a full-length statue of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya stood on this spot.

What to see

The composition is made of bronze and granite. It has six adult figures about 2.4 metres tall and three children; the bronze weighs more than nine tonnes in all. Each figure wears the national dress of one of the republic's peoples: the sculptors wanted to show that all of Bashkiria's peoples saw their men off to war together.

Many visitors say the faces look familiar, as if these were real people seeing their loved ones off to the front. The monument stands right on the way from the station into town, where anyone arriving in Ufa or seeing someone off can stop by it.

The station square during the war

In 1941–1945 Ufa became one of the centres of evacuation: factories were moved here, including the oil industry, which earned the city the name "the Second Baku", and so were people, many of them artists and writers. Trains to and from the front passed through this same station. The first train with demobilised soldiers arrived in Ufa on 28 July 1945, bringing 450 men home.

Getting there

The monument is on the square in front of Ufa railway station (Vokzalnaya Street), a few steps from the main entrance. Travellers arriving by train see the memorial as soon as they walk out into the city.