Letters to the Editor

To the Editors:

One of the best things about Russian Life are the images it brings from all corners of the huge country. In the current, May/June number – as well as the stunning landscape of  Khakassia – you show us the familiar Pushkin statue by Mikhail Anikushin in St. Petersburg, but also images of the remote Baikal-Amur Mainline zone. Is there a link between the last two articles, not made in the magazine?  

Your correspondent’s photograph of the First Builders (of the BAM) Monument in Komsomolsk is so strikingly similar in style to Anikushin’s sculptures on the Monument to the Defenders of Leningrad (in St Petersburg), that I wonder if he was also responsible for the animated figures in Komsomolsk?  The outstretched arm of the left-hand figure in the latter even recalls Pushkin’s eloquent gesture, as well as that of one of the Defenders.