Eternal Flame (Magnitogorsk)

The Eternal Flame in Magnitogorsk burns at the heart of a granite flower, the centrepiece of the "Home Front to Front" memorial in Victory Park, on the right bank of the Ural River. The memorial was unveiled on 29 June 1979, for the city's 50th anniversary; it was created by sculptor Lev Golovnitsky and architect Yakov Belopolsky.

The flower and its base are made of red-brown granite similar to that used to clad the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square. Granite blocks weighing 26-27 tons each were brought by rail from Karelia, at the time the only deposit of this stone, and the finished flower weighs about 68 tons; the work took more than six months. Prisoners from the YaV 48-18 facility cut the hard stone under the direction of engineer Anatoly Ignatenko, who used his own invention, a wire saw first tested on the Sayan Range. In 2001 the same saw was used to cut through the hull of the first compartment of the sunken nuclear-powered submarine Kursk.

The memorial is flanked by two trapezoidal steles bearing 54 steel plaques with the names of Magnitogorsk's Heroes of the Soviet Union. On 9 May 2005 black marble plaques with the names of fallen residents were added, bringing the memorial's total to about 14,000 names.