Under the goddess Nike's wing: What is the Victory monument on Poklonnaya Gora hiding?

A glass door on a snow-covered hill at the foot of the Obelisk of Victory is closed, and to get even this far you have to pass a barrier. There are few people to be seen here. Tourists tend to take pictures of the obelisk and move on to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. What this door is hiding is a station, where specialists from the Gormost state company monitor the state of the monument around the clock.

Inside it is warm, even with winter temperatures outside, and the space is green with various plants and flowers. In spring and summer, pots can be seen on shelves and even on the floor. Although all the engineers working here are men, the plants, perhaps surprisingly, are very well kept. But walking along the corridors with their bare walls, pipes, artificial lighting and air coming from the ventilation system, you understand that filling this space with plants brings a touch of life to this secluded space.

 

Signalling systems and an oscillation curve

Attached to a wall in the corridor are the monument’s schematics and instructions. The control room is to the left. Work is organised in four shifts with two engineers per shift. They spend 24 hours in a room with various monitoring devices. One screen flashes out numbers: wind speed (average and gusts), wind direction, temperature. Another screen shows a curve, but when the wind is weak, it looks more like a line. When the wind speed exceeds 17 metres per second, the system emits an alarm, which means that oscillations could be quite big.

Another screen shows camera images from the monument base and specific details, such as a riffle barrel in the base of the obelisk, the wreath Nike is holding in her hands and the hands of angels trumpeting victory. The video surveillance system is intended not just to monitor the state of the monument, but also to keep away climbers eager to scale the monument. However, as it gets colder fewer people are willing to try.

Tables are covered with log books where every shift reports what has happened and what needs additional attention.

“Of course, we are not just sitting here in the control room. We have an inspection plan, which means going up there and looking at the state of metal structures: elements, nodes and connections,” senior engineer Salkarbek Shamkanov said.

 

Damping oscillations behind the goddess’s back

The obelisk is a unique structure, not so much because of its height as its complex shape. The architects designed it to resemble the bayonets attached to Russian rifles that were produced in 1898. The unusual shape of the monument makes it unstable. The model was even subjected to wind tunnel tests in order to understand how the monument will withstand wind, and to calculate pressure.

“You see, the structure is triangular. Then there are the sculptures and Nike. Had it been a single obelisk, there would have been no problem, since you can find the proper coefficients in any manual. But in this case the way the structure behaves depends on wind direction,” Mr Shamkanov pointed out.

“Behaves” is hardly the appropriate word to describe a huge monument of steel, stone and bronze, but when the wind gets strong the obelisk comes to life and begins to move. When the wind exceeds 17 to 20 metres per second, fluctuations can be quite big. In 2000, the obelisk fluctuated by 90 centimetres. Cases like this are rare, however. “This year, for example, the maximum fluctuation was 45 centimetres,” a specialist said. He talks calmly about it, as if it were something ordinary, but you can’t fail to think: can a huge obelisk fluctuate that much?

In order to reduce these oscillations, special dampers were installed on the monument to deal with first and second bending mode fluctuations, as well as torsional motion. The main damper for the first bending mode is right behind Nike. It is a 10-tonne structure, the fluctuations of which are in the opposite phase compared to the rest of the structure, which attenuates fluctuations.

“This is the most important damper. It dampens first bending mode waves, which cause the biggest oscillations. There is also the second bending mode, smaller oscillations with small amplitudes, but high frequency,” Mr Shamkanov went on to say.

A hatch for accessing the dampers behind Nike’s back was installed at a height of 100 metres. Looking out of it, you can see Kutuzovsky Prospekt. But an ordinary person can’t get that far. For that, you need to go up a vertical ladder, and a special permit for working at height is required. Instead, I was offered to ride in a lift.

Attention! The ascent… is open

A corridor, several steps, a small platform and finally a strange narrow opening in the wall that looks like an entrance into a submarine or a space ship. Accessing the lift requires squeezing and bending. Engineers wear hard hats for a reason. You have to constantly watch your head, even though the opening is painted in black and yellow strips and is easy to see.

Inside the hollow obelisk it is almost as cold as outside. All you can see are beams and a staircase, and wires everywhere sending information to the control room about the dampers and wind speed and direction. Inside, the monument is illuminated with lamps, highlighting huge bolts that hold the structure together. On the outside, the obelisk is mostly covered with bas-reliefs, and here these decorations form intricate patterns.

The Swedish lift has two platforms on top of each other with a maximum lift weight of 250 kilogrammes. Nevertheless, only two people are allowed to ride it at once due to the lack of space. Mr Shamkanov asks me to remain within the cabin and not to lean out. “The gap between the lift and the wall is very small, so it can work just like a guillotine,” he warns.

When the lift goes up, Mr Shamkanov closes the door with a chain and a sign, reading “Ascent closed.” Being careful never hurts: one wrong step, and you fall.

On the lift, the small platform is surrounded by a railing, but there are no walls, which makes the ride a scary experience. As we go up, we see signs painted in white: 8.5, 11.5, 17.5, 26.5 metres… Every 12 metres there is a platform. They all look the same, but they become narrower as you travel up the obelisk. The lift stops short of reaching the top of the monument, since it becomes too narrow. After that, stairs are the only option.

“This is good exercise,” the good humoured engineer on duty, Andrei Malykhin, says. He is used to climbing up stairs, jumping from one beam to another and fixing life lines properly. He goes up here quite frequently: to oil one piece or another, paint or replace a light bulb. Sometimes when the wind gets strong, the damper stops moving. This means something is jamming the mechanism, and he has to climb up there and fix it.

These people have been working here since the 1990s. “Over the years, this job has lost much of is romantic appeal for me,” Andrei Malykhin said. Still, this is what he prefers to do, and has no intention to work in an office.