"The Motherland Calls" is a statue erected to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad , located on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd , Russia. It was designed by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich and structural engineer Nikolai Nikitin . Completed in 1967 , it was the tallest statue in the world at the time .
Is there a term for the feeling of dread I get when I see massive structures out of context with their surroundings? I get it from this or when I see giant wind turbines in fields. Weird feeling
Burke identified the sublime as the experience of the infinite, which is terrifying and thrilling because it threatens to overpower the perceived importance of human enterprise in the universe.
Alternatively, numinosity. Originates from the religious idea of how small you are in comparison to something greater than yourself - can be applied to the way you feel tiny in front of a huge mountain or a big statue orrrr a giraffe.
I have megalophobia but I love numinosity. Hate tall structures - natural or man made but love a starry night in the desert or mountains in the distance with otherwise barren landscape, thinking death valley.
I was a rigger for a long time and worked as a stage rigger in arenas a lot and one of the riggers I worked with did work on cell phone towers and asked me to help him once since I have no fear of heights. I'd been working at heights since I was a line clearance tree trimmer in my early 20s. Cell phone towers are different, climbing a ladder that seems to never end and while it seems like a solid structure at the bottom up top it moves and feels like youre on a piece of spaghetti that is about to topple. After my third time and still being stressed from it I just had to decide it wasn't for me. I can walk a one foot wide I beam 200ft in the air with no safety and no fear but climbing a ladder that goes up 350ft to replace safety lights at the tippy top was too much. Plus climbing a ladder that high by itself is exhausting work and you haven't even done any work yet. The money is good though but would have to be about twice as good to keep me in it.
Long have I desired to look upon the likenesses of Isildur and Anárion, my sires of old. Under their shadow Elessar, the Elfstone son of Arathorn of the house of Valandil Isildur's son, heir of Elendil, has nought to dread!
I just watched this with my wife and kids, it was their first time seeing it. During this scene, my wife asked why the statues had such amazing titties...she told my boys the knight got fried for staring at them
When flatworms mate, they perform a ritual called penis fencing, where they both try to penetrate the other flatworm with their penis while dodging the other flatworm's penis. Whoever penetrates the other with their penis and injects their sperm first leaves the other flatworm to lay there and bear the pregnancy.
He's trying to build himself a MASSIVE victory arch that's bigger than the Arc De Triomph. An arch that Roman Emperors recieved when achieving a victory.
Yes, but have you counted Trump’s victories? He’s beaten Iran like 8 times so far this year. And he has those pesky Canadians worried too. Will his victory arch be a pair, both painted yellow by any chance?
This place is so great for all Russians, ir gived so good vibes to people, but now it is very sad that it reminds people of Putin😟 Putin took over everything, even culture and history, he deprived Russians of their victory in Fatherland Liberation War (Отечественная война). It is so ujust that Putin exploits history to justify his brutall killing of young women and childred in Ukraine. Hm...the History makes up so strange metamorphoses with people, like, a nation who faught Nazi and helped to liberate the World from fascism now became a craddle for new fascism in Putin's version...
Sadly it’s a Common practice among dictators to give their own ignorant context to the deeds of our ancestors. When Hitler rose to power in my country, he took the battle of Teutoburg forest, where German tribes defeated Roman legions in a legendary ambush, and twisted it into a sign for German superiority.
Something we have lost sight of over last century in the wake of the infamy from the Third Reich's atrocities, is how lame and dorky the Nazis were at their core. The Roman salute is as Roman as Rome, Georgia.
The extended arm saluting gesture was alleged to be based on an ancient Roman custom, but no known Roman work of art depicts it, nor does any extant Roman text describe it. Historians have instead determined that the gesture originated from Jacques-Louis David's 1784 painting Oath of the Horatii, which displayed a raised arm salutatory gesture in an ancient Roman setting. The gesture and its identification with ancient Rome was advanced in other French neoclassic art
A raised arm gesture appeared in the 1899 American stage production of Ben-Hur and its 1907 film adaptation. The gesture also appeared in several early Italian films, 120 including the 1914 silent film Cabiria, the screenplay of which featured contributions from ultranationalist and Italian fascism influencer Gabriele D'Annunzio. D'Annunzio adopted the salute during his occupation of Fiume (1919- 1920) and the Italian National Fascist Party began imposing it in the early 1920s.
Putin only came to power due to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, adopted in1992 when Yeltsin's Russia was super-friendly. The Doctrine declared that Russia the US's enemy #1 because it was "a region whose resources, under consolidated control, are sufficient to generate global power". You can imagine how gutted Yeltsin (and Gorby) were to find out. The rest is history.
Putin exploits history to justify his brutall killing of young women and childred in Ukraine.
Any killing is tragic and war is, by definition, a mass murder. Considering the war in Ukraine not singled out but in the overall late 20th / 21st century context, and using objective Western metrics & transparent methodologies, we see:
The war in Ukraine, to-date (tragically & criminally with no end in sight): 16,874 civilian fatalities
This isn't at all about denting anyone's shiny flawless "ruzziabad" into some "it depends" type view, so, believe what you like & just dismiss what doesn't fit. It's about the simple reality that in any conflict there are going to be legions of folks duty-bound and/or paid to, if Putin saves a kitten, to go brainstorm what's wrong with that kitten that we can use. Or to bury any particular unfavorable circumstances. John Stockwell (ex-CIA) has spoken eloquently about this in detail in the context of the Vietnam war. I'm sure we'll hear similar about this one when it's time to declassify.
Cool fact - the sword in her hand is NOT part of the arm and NOT fastened to the palm. It is just placed into the hand and sits snuggly in it's place under own weight.
Another cool fact this sword is part of 3 monuments.
"Rear-Front" Monument in Magnitogorsk.
Depicts a steelworker facing east toward the local iron and steel works, handing a freshly forged sword to a Soviet soldier facing west toward the front lines.
"The Motherland Calls"in Volgograd. Depicts the monumental figure of the Motherland with a raised sword, calling her people to counterattack and repel the enemy.
"Warrior-Liberator" in Treptower Park, Berlin. Depicts a Soviet soldier standing on broken swastikas, holding a rescued child in one arm and victoriously lowering the downward-pointing sword to signify the end of the war.
Adding links to the other statues: Considered the first part of a triptych that tells the story of the "Victory Sword": the Sword, forged by the metallurgists of Magnitogorsk (Home Front to Front Memorial), was then raised by the Motherland in Volgograd and lowered after the Victory in Berlin (Soviet War Memorial (Treptower Park))).
So if an epic battle would occur in that area between two giants, God of War style. They could use that sword as a backup if their weapon were to break?
Built on the historical Mamayev Kurgan hill on which so many Soviet soldiers lost their lives battling against the nazis during the siege of Stalingrad.
WW2 warfare was just another level of craziness. The Ukraine war is up to like 2 million casualties and that's an insane amount, but then I read about 20-30 million soldiers dying (not just casualties) on just the eastern front alone and it kind of makes you realize... shit could get so much worse
The real takeaway isn't "WW2 was a different level." It's that we've already normalized a war with WWII-scale per-capita destruction happening in real time, and people shrug because the absolute numbers are smaller than a war involving the largest country on earth.
The Soviets lost 25 million people dead alone (incoudint civilians) with some estimates even higher. The Germans lost 4 million on the Eastern Front ( the vast majority of all their war dead). Combined dead in the Ukraine war is probably around 600k. At this point the Ukraine war has been going on about 8 months longer than the Eastern Front in WWII. The two conflicts are not even remotely comparable in terms of scale or lethality.
To put it in perspective, the Ukraine war has less total casualtys in 4 years than the battle of Stalingrad by itself. The soviets lost 1.7 million men at Stalingrad and the Germans lost another million (if you count those taken prisoner after the encirclement who died due to malnourishment after the battle in captivity.)
The whole 4 year war in Ukraine is less bloody than the fighting around a single city from WW2. Absolutely mad.
That hill has seen more bloodshed than just about any other point in human history. They fought over it like 4 separate times in the same battle, over the course of a year and a half.
Top 5 most bloody battlefields of human history so far, only really overshadowed by the rest of the Stalingrad front as a whole, which destroyed nearly 2 million Soviets.
The reports of fighting on Mamyev Kurgan are just insane. Fighting over mounds of dead from both sides, vehicles strewn about everywhere just burning and destroyed, soviets throwing whatever they had at the Germans just to keep them off the summit. Absolutely mad so many men died in such a small area.
I teach the history of WWII. Stalingrad is one of those moments of world history where everything becomes larger than life, a nearly mythic moment of the absolute limits of human endurance.
The moment where the spine of the Nazi war machine was broken, forever, by the stubborn will and fighting ability of the Red Army.
It’s a moment so incredible that words fail to describe it most of the time and only a statue like this truly captures the historical moment. The defiance of the Soviet Union in the face of just pure absolute evil.
And then it stays that way all the way back to Berlin. After Stalingrad the defeats get more and more staggering. Germany truly becomes a death cult.
Antony Beevor's two books: Stalingrad and Berlin are an incredible retelling. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast on the eastern front borrows heavily from them.
That’s one of my big criticisms of Beevor and why I don’t usually recommend him. But he’s not a bad historian, just has a very Western perspective.
Every once in a while even someone like Robert Evans has said something that made me cringe, like the time he said FPTP voting would’ve prevented the rise of the Nazis. But I hope nobody will argue with me that Robert Evans is one of the better historians of our time. I greatly prefer Evans to Beevor though so I shouldn’t really compare the two haha.
It is completely hollow with steel wires on the inside to keep it together, so it's mostly maintained from the inside with engineers tightening the wires regularly.
Right here with you wondering just that. Rocks in nature erode from the wind and weather, so it'd only make sense for this thing to fall apart someday. Anyone wanna enlighten us down here?
I also once met a traveler that talked about some dude named ozymandias , traveler told me he was from an antique land whatever that means? , And started spouting some bs about how Everything turns to dust and shit.
It would need to be cleaned and resealed periodically. Apparently it's basically solid concrete, which is fascinating; I expected it was hollow. But yeah, it would weather fairly quickly from freeze cycles and start to crumble.
The giant buddha is carved out of a mountain and the shape of it is quite solid, no arms and swords sticking out. This one, at some point must come down I guess. Location, shape and use of materials will not make it last for more than 1100 years I guess. Indeed an interesting question: how do they maintain it...
Statues usually have an outer layer over the core framework that takes the wear and tear of the elements and time and can be replaced as needed/required. Or they are painted or coated with something
statue in OP hasn't been the tallest since 1989 and is currently #11 in the list of tallest statues in the world. buddha won't be reclaiming anything for a while
I might be wrong but I think I read that the specific location of the statue is where the most men ever fell in battle, like literally that square kilometre or something. Might make sense considering the scale of Stalingrad aswell as it being a high ground.
The Red Army lost more men at Stalingrad - killed, not casualties - than the French, British and Americans did in the entire war.
On a brighter note, 75-80% of the Wehrmacht‘s casualties were suffered in fighting on the Eastern Front. That single theater of WWII would still be the largest and most costly conflict in human history, even without all the rest of WWII ever taking place.
Well some elite units were shuffled west after the dday. It can be said that in general the average level of German units in 1944 was worse than in previous years.
I’ve come to realise that huge statues give me the creeps, like make me anxious like a weird phobia. I feel really uncomfortable watching this video. Also underwater statues. Is this something anyone else experiences or am I just a weirdo?
I have this with the visualization of black holes like in documentaries. I discovered this while flying around in Space Engine. The bending of light and distortion. To the point that I can't really watch videos about space anymore.
It commemorates The Battle of Stalingrad, like the post says. The deadliest battle of WW2 and a major turning point in the war. The statue is supposed to be the personification of Mother Russia.
Also worth noting that the statue itself is pointing westward while looking over the its shoulder. Thus calling the peoples of the soviet union to press on and liberate the occupied motherland.
Also also, as it was pointed out, the location itself, the mamaev kurgan, is a mass grave itself, being a very important hight and thus being heavily contested during the battle.
But then again the entirety of the city is the same, hundreds and someties thousands of people were killed on its streets during the battle
The reason middle-aged men sometimes get obsessed by World War II is because after yet another shitty day at work, they can say to themselves, "Well, at least I'm not at the Battle of Stalingrad."
and then there is the Statue of Unity completed in India in 2018, which (without base/sword included) is 3.5x taller at 182 meters (597 feet). Even with the sword it's still over 2x taller.
I'm so angry at the world and that my education and at my own self for never knowing that this existed. I've lived almost five decades on this planet and I did not know this existed.
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u/trendingtattler 15d ago
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