# Golden Boy (Anikushin)

Golden Boy (Russian: Золотой мальчик) is a sculpture by Mikhail Anikushin, People's Artist of the USSR and winner of the Lenin Prize and I. E. Repin State Prizes of the RSFSR. It was designed as part of the Memorial to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad [ru] during the blockade, which was opened in Leningrad in 1975 by architects Valentin Kamensky and Sergei Speransky. The sculptor's grandson, Adrian Anikushin, modeled for this sculpture.
Among art historians, there is no consensus on whether the sculpture was the central part of the original memorial or its final version. According to the memoirs of some of Anikushin's contemporaries, it did not take its intended place in the sculptural and architectural composition on Victory Square in accordance with the verbal Grigory Romanov's (First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee) decision.
Both existing versions of Golden Boy were executed in bronze and covered with gold leaf, and were lost. The Mikhail Anikushin Workshop, a branch of the State Museum of City Sculpture [ru], displays a plaster model of the sculpture.

## Sculpture

The sculpture belongs to the collection of the State Museum of City Sculpture in St. Petersburg and the permanent exposition of the Mikhail Anikushin Workshop, a museum's branch. It is exposed in the hall dedicated to the master's creation of the monument To the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad. The sculpture is 98.5 cm high, and 30 cm wide. Its inventory number is NVF-98. In the short exhibition's summary, the sculpture is called Golden Boy. 1975.
The sculpture is a plaster model of a bronze and covered with gold leaf sculpture, that has not survived. On the backs of both hands, there are elements of a metal frame which are visible beneath the plaster's surface. The sculpture represents a completely naked 5–6 years boy. The boy's head is slightly raised, and he is gazing forward. The child's right foot is supported, while the left foot is slightly forward as if he has just made a step; the toes of that foot are spread out and extended beyond the pedestal. On the upper part of the small round pedestal on which the statue stands, behind the boy's feet, one can easily read the inscription made by the sculptor: 1975. M. Anikushin. The inscription is scratched into the wet plaster. The boy's hands are raised in front of his abdomen and are slightly distanced from his body. The elbows are bent and positioned behind his back.

## Sculpture’s history
### Mikhail Anikushin's plan

Elena Litovchenko, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts and Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation, wrote that Mikhail Anikushin “suffered from the impossibility of speaking sincerely about the tragedy of Leningrad”. He envisioned the memorial to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad consists of tragic, solemn, and lyrical figures, aiming for it to “stand out with soulfulness and lyricism” in contrast to the erected monuments, with symbolic elements. The sculptor insisted on rejecting pathos and conventional realism. His contemporaries noted that Anikushin constantly improvised during his creative process. He described “sincerity and individuality” in this memorial ensemble as his “author's protest against the so-called generalized, conventional monuments”.
The composition of the memorial is divided into three parts: a staircase with sculptural groups and an obelisk, an open-air hall in the form of a broken ring, and an underground memorial museum. According to the author's plan, the tour of the memorial complex should begin at the staircase. The contrast between the dynamic sculptures and the balanced, static architectural structure imbues the staircase ensemble with “excitement and spirituality”. Currently, the composition of the staircase includes 26 figures facing the front line during the blockade. Another figure was created as a plaster model and later cast in metal in accordance with the sculptor's original vision.
Mikhail Anikushin wrote in his diary about the work on the Golden Boy:
   “There were three projects for the monument. In the second project, I thought for a long time about what to place at the center of the composition. And suddenly, I realized: the symbol was found! It is the a small child figure — his striving for life should connect all these big and courageous people. We fought not for glory; we fought for life. And the child, for me, symbolizes this invincible life. But they wouldn’t let me. I cried for a week...The third one was approved".
Alexander Zamoshkin, a candidate of art history and corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, wrote in a 1978 monograph on the sculptor's work that the original memorial projects were created as a mockup with 15 cm figures. Due to this approach it was possible to see the whole composition and the placement of each individual sculpture and group. In the project exposed at the 1972 exhibition, the Golden Boy sculpture was placed at the very edge of the elliptical site. The child symbolized “the life to come, the establishment of peace and tranquility on earth”. In contrast, the other sculptural groups —“sternly powerful, extremely tired people”— represented the blockade's suffering and the citizens's courage and solidarity, their “the will to fight”. The new project, created after the end of the exhibition, incorporated suggestions from Leningraders who had endured the blockade. It was characterized by monumentality, with a giant statue of Victory playing a central role. According to the art historian, this statue, revived ancient traditions of depicting heroic feats. In front of this statue, on the same axis as in the previous project, at the beginning of the stylobate, stood the sculpture of a child, which retained its original meaning as the "renewal of life" and the "embodiment of the future". On either side of this axis were two multi-figure compositions depicting the military and labor exploits of Leningrad residents. In 1973, the project was approved by the Leningrad City Planning Committee, the Art Council of the Main Department of Culture of the Leningrad Executive Committee, and the Presidium of the Leningrad branches of the Union of Architects of the USSR and the Union of Artists of the RSFSR. After this approval, according to Alexander Zamoshkin, Anikushin continued to refine the composition. As a result, the statue of Victory was replaced by the Winners — a statue that was more concrete than allegorical, portraying the heroes of Leningrad. In the spring of 1974, the project was finally approved by the board of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, and work on its realization began. In Zamoshkin's account of this project, he no longer mentions the freestanding figure of the child, Golden Boy.
Elena Lezik, the director of the State Memorial Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, describes the work on the project somewhat differently in her article about the monumental complex. She wrote about the very first compositional version: “And in the center of the composition, without a high pedestal and directly on the ground, stands a small figure of a boy. This is a little boy: a great human sacrifices were made from his happiness". She also claimed that as early as May 1972, the people of Leningrad saw this very model of the future monument at an exhibition in the State Russian Museum. The Doctor of Art History, professor, and corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, Igor Bartenev, mentioned one of the variants in which a mother holds a small boy above her head on top of the obelisk — “our future, the representative of the generations following us, for whose happiness the Soviet people fought with the furious enemy”.
Yuri Trefilov, a journalist and a close friend of Mikhail Anikushin, attributed the appearance of the Golden Boy to the final stage of work on the monument. During his work, the obelisk of 48 meters above the monument caused a lot of difficulties. In front of it, according to Anikushin's idea, the Winners should be placed: the statues Soldier and Worker. The authors could not come up with a successful completion of the obelisk itself. They suggested a golden wreath of glory, the Order of Victory, a statue of the goddess of victory Nike, and an angel. Among Anikushin's proposals was the figure of a boy, one and a half meters tall, made in the classical Greek style. The first secretary of the Leningrad regional committee Grigory Romanov, as it seemed to the sculptor during the discussion, supported this option, but suggested that the Golden Boy not be placed on the top of the obelisk, where no one would be able to see it, but on the top step of the stairs leading to the central composition of the complex — the Winners group. The meaning that Romanov gave to this position of the sculpture of the child — the heroes of the War fought against fascism, standing behind the back of the boy who will become a symbol of life, worked and fought for the sake of children of new generations like him.
The sculpture was made in metal of the highest standards. At the request of the sculptor even two "boys" were prepared and covered with a layer of gold leaf. At the same time, the whole monument is executed in dark colors — in dark red granite (it was noted that it was mined exclusively from local deposits near Vyborg and Priozersky, in 1974 it was assumed that the granite would be pink) and patinated bronze, which create a strict and traditional for Leningrad solemn color palette.

### Model

Mikhail Anikushin's grandson, Adrian, claimed in his publications that he was the prototype for the Golden Boy, but he interpreted the place of this sculpture differently in the whole composition of the memorial. According to him, “instead of him [Golden Boy] in the middle, they put a giant stick, saying that the small figure from the airplane was invisible” — the boy should have stood not in front of the Soldier and Worker, but behind them, in place of the stele. At the same time, he, along with other sources, assesses the role of the boy in the sculptor's plan: “This child was supposed to run down the stairs as a symbol of life returning to the city”.
Adrian Anikushin's words are confirmed by the artist's article Pain and Courage, published in the May 1975 issue of the magazine Avrora (it was written before the official opening of the Memorial, and while working on it Anikushin was sure that the statue of the Golden Boy would be placed in the place intended for it):
   I spent a long time thinking about what to put in the center of the composition. Once, while I was working on the monument, my five-year-old grandson Adriyashka came running to the studio. Suddenly, it became clear to me: I found the symbol! It was a figure of a small child, his tiny life, which should connect all these great and courageous people. The Nazi officers urged their soldiers: "Destroy, crush, hack for the glory of the Fuhrer — and let your conscience be clear..." We weren't fighting for glory, we were fighting for the life. And for me, the child symbolizes this invincible life.
The Soviet poet, publicist, and playwright Vsevolod Azarov recalled that when he and Mikhail Anikushin were discussing the first draft of the future monument in his studio in Vyazemsky Garden, "light, hurried steps were heard" and the sculptor's little grandson ran into the room. Azarov asked the sculptor if the image of the child in the center of the composition was not related to this boy. Anikushin just smiled.

### Destination

Yuri Trefilov knew Anikushin and the monument's planning project, speculated that Grigory Romanov changed his position on the boy's sculpture at the very last moment, when he was preparing to move to Moscow and be promoted. He believes that the reason for this decision was that the party official did not want to risk his career. Romanov did not want to sacrifice it to an artistic solution that was controversial from the point of view of ideology and philistine morals. Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee responsible for ideological work, was to arrive in Leningrad for the opening of the monument. The "gray cardinal", as he was called, was known for his puritanical morals. He could negatively evaluate the nakedness of an underage boy, who occupied such an important position in the composition of the monument dedicated to the World War II, and welcomed visitors even at the approach to its central figures.
Trefilov thought that Romanov saw the "strong, shining" boy as very different from the emaciated heroes of the Blockade composition in the inner part of the broken ring of the monument. The situation was also complicated by the fact that visitors could easily see the Golden Boy, who was on the same level as them, without the high pedestal on which the other sculptures stood. The Golden Boy was also much smaller than the other figures in the composition. He was only 1.5 meters high, while the other figures were over 3.5 meters tall. As Trefilov put it, the Golden Boy "can be grabbed by anyone ... anywhere". The regional party organization told the sculpture director to take his time installing the statue. "Don't rush. Let's open the monument quietly, and then we'll deal with this". But this didn't mean they were going to put the sculpture back in the monument. They never did find the sculpture, and now there are no traces of either version. Anikushin's student, Vladimir Gorevoi, who worked on the monument, remembered that after it opened, the sculptor's studio in Vyazemsky Garden brought one of the two bronze Golden Boy, which no one wanted. However, he did not know what happened to this sculpture or the second version.
Anikushin was not warned of the complications that arose during the installation of the monumental complex. Seeing that the sculpture was missing on the day of the memorial's opening (on May 4, 1975, it was presented to the distinguished Moscow guests), the sculptor continued to believe that it would soon be brought to the beginning of the ceremony itself. Several times he tried to call the director of Monumentsculpture from the neighboring hotel Pulkovskaya, but each time he received a reply from the secretary that the director was absent, having gone to Smolny to find out the fate of the sculpture from the Party leadership. In the end, Mikhail Anikushin left the opening ceremony and went to the factory himself, where he did not find the boy's sculpture, but the director of Monumentsculpture V. P. Stepanov. According to Yuri Trefilov, who witnessed their meeting, Anikushin grabbed Stepanov's cane and three times, chasing the director who was running away from him (Stepanov was wounded during the World War II and therefore limped), circled a large table in pursuit of him. Only when Stepanov shouted to Anikushin that Grigory Romanov had forbidden him to erect the sculpture of the boy, the sculptor stopped. Anikushin himself did not like to remember the story of the Golden Boy. It became widely known only years after his death. Yuri Trefilov's version of the last minute change of the city authorities' attitude to the boy's sculpture is confirmed by an article by the art historian Nina Veselitskaya-Ignatius in the May 1975 issue of Tvorchestvo. The author of the article describes in detail the recently opened memorial and does not mention the Golden Boy, but the illustration to the article with the caption "Monument in honor to the heroic defense of Leningrad in 1941-1943 and the defeat of Nazi troops in 1944. 1975. Layout", the sculpture of a child is clearly visible.
Vadim Bass, an architectural historian and associate professor at the Department of Art History of the European University at St. Petersburg, also wrote in his article A Modernist Monument for a Classical City that the Golden Boy was present in the memorial designs until the last moment (in his words, he embodied the present for which sacrifices were made during the war years). During this time, versions of the project with him were presented both to the public (in the archives there are about 4,500 sheets of appeals to the Public Commission, reviews of project exhibitions, and letters to newspaper editors about the memorial) and to the city government. The decision of the city authorities was taken, contracts with the executors were signed, but in reality the final form of the ensemble was formed only at the last moment. The working model of the sculpture Golden Boy was accepted by Mikhail Anikushin only on March 3, 1975, that is, two months before the end of work on the ensemble. At the same time, the project itself, with his figure in the foreground, was published in 1973 in the magazine Construction and Architecture of Leningrad No. 9. An unattributed drawing of the Golden Boy, clearly visible in the composition of the memorial's staircase, was also published there.
In 2017, the Golden Boy was presented in St. Petersburg at the exhibition Sculptor Anikushin, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of his birth. Mikhail Anikushin's pencil and ballpoint sketches on paper for the monument with the figure of the Golden Boy were presented at an exhibition in Leningrad in 1988.

## Reviews

Viktor Ganshin, a writer and publicist from the Soviet Union and Russia, wrote about a statue of a child reaching for the sun and light. The child was standing on a pedestal that was 30 meters tall. The pedestal held a 15-meter statue of Victory holding a waving banner. According to Ganshin, the Golden Boy represents "the joy and hope of future generations, their unbreakable chain." He also quoted the sculptor's own words about the sculpture: "Such a monument should be a warning to future soldiers. Our grandchildren were born in a peaceful time, and we must make sure that our experiences do not ruin their lives".
Journalist and writer Viktor Senin called the Golden Boy "a poetic resolution of the concept" of the entire memorial. Senin wrote that "the boy connects each composition of the monument with invisible threads". He saw in the sculpture "a symbol of the invincibility of life".
Nikolai Malakhov, a candidate of philosophical sciences, wrote in his 1976 book On the Historical Significance of Soviet Fine Art, that the Golden Boy faces the viewer and "symbolizes the saved life of Leningrad's youth. The four-sided granite obelisk and the sculptural group the Winners behind it are symbols of the unbreakable unity of the heroic defenders of the city and the entire Soviet people. According to Malakhov, all the sculptor's works are not allegorical, because "there is no excessive generalization of forms". They "bear the stamp of easel work, endowed with a high degree of bourgeois art, combined with a subtle nuance of the heroes' characters". In these figures, he noted the psychological intensity, the social capacity, the artistic expressiveness, "a combination of subtle lyricism with the deepest awareness of the social mission of art".
Igor Bartenev wrote about the process of working on the sculpture in his article The Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad in the Great Patriotic War. The article was published in 1980. The sculpture was made in Mikhail Anikushin's workshop in Vyazemsky Garden in Leningrad. A group of workers made a frame and covered it with wooden panels according to the artist's sketch. The workers were A. Grigoriev, A. Ezhkov, V. Pospelov, B. Chadaev, and V. Shilin. Using this frame as a model, a life-size sculpture was made out of clay. When the basic shapes were finished, Mikhail Anikushin and his students V. Azemsha, O. Godes, V. Gorevoi, S. Kubasov, V. Neimark, and V. Petin started working on the sculpture. At this stage, the details of the sculpture were modeled in clay based on the artist's vision. The next step was "molding in plaster," which was done by a team made up of I. and N. Petrunin and V. Ivanov. Then, the plaster model was transported from the sculptor's studio to the Monument Sculpture Company. The whole process of making the statue from the frame to the casting took several months. In his book, Bartenev quotes two photographs of undated models of the monument. In one of them, the Golden Boy stands in front of a single sculpture on a high pedestal shaped like a wide semicircle. In the other photograph, taken from above, the Golden Boy stands at the top of a flight of stairs, a distance from the broad, low stele behind him. His figure is slightly in front of the center of the round pedestal of the monument.
Writer Daniil Granin believed that the sculpture of the boy was central to the sculptor's original intention. He wrote in his book Memory Quirks:
   The project of the Blokada monument was also good. Even in the sketch Mikhail Konstantinovich showed me. On it are the figures of dystrophic, starving, deprived citizens, bombed, shelled, all the misfortunes of the war fell on them. In 900 days they became shadows, transparent, weightless. Why are they still alive? Where are they going? They go to the boy, the golden boy, the embodiment of victory, shines before them. This is their faith. The author has found a beautiful metaphor, a symbol of the siege epic, despite everything, we believed in Victory.
The author says that the city's party leadership put pressure on the group, and that's how the idea started to change. The image of the boy went against the new idea approved by the regional committee. People from different parts of the population (soldiers, sailors of the Baltic Fleet, pilots, etc.) were guided by a new "reference point" — the party that led Leningraders to victory. So, according to the writer, "the boy was completely removed." Granin himself had a very negative opinion of the new concept for the monument and the rejection of the child figure that the sculptor had created. He said that now there are only "defenders of the city" left, that the "soul of the monument has been taken out of the monument," that it's only worth looking at and causes confusion, and that party ignoramuses are destroying art.
The sculptor Grigory Yastrebenetsky in the article Forgotten subjects noted an extremely successful solution of the author's project of the monument: "In the foreground, in the gap between two semicircular pedestals, on which are placed multi-figure compositions of soldiers — participants of the war, who achieved victory, should stand a golden child, in whose name, in the name of the future, fought and died soldiers depicted on the monument. The absence of this figure, in his opinion, "considerably impoverished the idea of the monument and worsened its composition". In his other book, The Author's Interview with Himself, Yastrebenetsky saw the situation with the Golden Boy as one of several serious mistakes made by the people who worked with Anikushin on the monument: "On a big square, even large figures look tiny, especially since the Golden Boy could get lost among them"; Anikushin's sculptures "don't have a clear outline," so from far away they might look like "dark worms with ... confused legs"; and the two 22-story buildings without faces standing at the entrance to the city on the square on either side of the monument. He wrote that Anikushin was most tormented by the search for a solution to the central part of the memorial, which was to carry the meaning of a symbol. Yastrebenetsky thought that "the best and strongest of all [in this role] was the boy". For him and the future he represented, the figures around him had performed heroic deeds. Yastrebenetsky also included other symbols at the center of the monument, such as the Motherland Calls image and the Victory Banner. The two large figures Soldier and Worker, representing the front and the rear, in his opinion, cannot be considered as symbols, because in this case the purpose of the sculptural groups in the square in front of them is unclear. The theme of the memorial is now revealed twice, in one case "in symbolic images" (Soldier and Worker) and in the other case "illustratively" (the rest of the sculptural compositions of the ground part of the memorial in front of the Winners).
The historian and journalist Tatiana Kutsenina wrote that "a child is the most important part of any war." For this reason, he was the main figure in a sculpture that honored the heroic defenders of Leningrad during the siege. In her interpretation, "he would stand next to the adults — fighters, factory workers, men and women who defended their beloved city". Children were not directly involved in the events that took place during the blockade, but they were affected by it. They experienced hunger, death, and struggle for survival. However, if older children could take care of themselves, younger children, like the boy Anikushin, did not have this option. They, along with their mothers, wandered through the woods, sat behind barbed wire, and endured the harsh conditions of Leningrad's apartments in the dark.