The Alexander II Monument in Kyiv (1911)

The Russian Empire erected in Kyiv the largest monument to Alexander II in the entire empire. The gratitude on the pedestal was voiced not by Ukraine and not by Kyiv but by the "Southwestern Krai" - the empire's official name for the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnipro^[2]. The monument, by the Italian sculptor Ximenes, was unveiled on 30 August 1911 on Tsarskaya Square, between the entrance to the Merchants' Garden and the building of the Merchants' Assembly; the unveiling was timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of serfdom and held in the presence of emperor Nicholas II, the Bulgarian tsar Ferdinand and prime minister Stolypin, who two days later, on the evening of 1 September, was mortally wounded in the Kyiv theater^[3]. The money for the monument was raised by an all-Russian subscription, 200 thousand rubles^[1]. The central pedestal bore the coat of arms of the empire, the double-headed eagle, and the inscription "To the Tsar-Liberator, the grateful Southwestern Krai. The year 1911"; on the lower pedestal was a bas-relief of peasants giving thanks for the abolition of serfdom^[1]. The krai comprised the Kyiv, Volyn and Podillia governorates^[2], which after the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830-1831 were merged into the Kyiv governorate-general (1832-1914), whose task, according to the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, "consisted in the liquidation of the political, socio-ethnic and cultural distinctions of the krai and the intensification of the russification of its elite - the szlachta"^[4]. The monument joined a row: the Kyiv Nicholas I (1896), Alexander III (1909), Alexander II (1911), Stolypin (1912) - the historian Ihor Hyrych calls this the pre-revolutionary monument boom and adds that the erection of the monument to princess Olha and the planned subsequent monuments were handled by the Kyiv section of the Imperial Russian Military-Historical Society, nine-tenths of which consisted of officers of the Kyiv military district, and its secretary, colonel Steletsky, in a memorandum to the governor-general of 7 April 1910, laid out the queue of future sculptures - from Olha and Oleh to Nestor the chronicler^[5]. Hyrych sums up the outcome of those same years thus: in that time the Ukrainians put forward one monument, to Shevchenko, and were not allowed to erect it, while their opponents managed to put up "at least half a dozen monuments asserting Russianness and negating the Ukrainian national idea"^[5].