The 12-meter-high
monument was unveiled on August 19, 1945.
VIENNA, July 5.
/TASS/. Unknown vandals have desecrated a World War II memorial on the
Schwarzenbergplatz square in central Vienna dedicated to Soviet soldiers who
liberated the country from Nazi occupation in 1945. Paint was splattered over
the monument, the Russian Embassy in Austria told TASS on Thursday.
The monument to the
Soviet soldiers in the Austrian capital has been repeatedly defaced by vandals.
On January 16, 2017, unknown attackers spilled dark red paint over the
monument’s base. On January 10 and March 6, 2018, black paint was splattered
over the monument. Following each act of vandalism the Russian embassy sent a
note of protest to the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding that
urgent measures be taken to clear away the damage inflicted, detect and punish
the perpetrators and prevent vandal attacks in the future.
The 12-meter-high
monument was unveiled on August 19, 1945. It features a soldier with a PPSh-41
submachine gun on a 20-meter base, which reads Stalin’s order for Vienna’s
liberation, the text of the Soviet poet Sergey Mikhalkov’s poetic address to
soldiers, the second couplet of the Soviet state hymn in its 1943 version and
an excerpt from Joseph Stalin’s speech of May 9, 1945. There is a colonnade
behind the monument with inscription in Russian, which reads "Eternal
glory to the heroes of the Red Army who fell in battle against the German
fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the peoples of
Europe." There are figures of Soviet soldiers in action on both ends of
the colonnade.
Source: ITAR-TASS
05-07-2018
