Monument to Emperor Alexander II
Found… On the River Bottom?

VELIKY NOVGOROD (RIA Novosti, by Andrei Letyagin) - The drifting of ice on the Volkhov river does not allow the Novgorod divers to continue the search for a monument to emperor Alexander II (1818-1881, the emperor from 1855) on the bottom of the river, the members of the diving club of the ancient Russian city on the Volkhov river in the North-West of Russia said.

"The winter shuga (small ice on the water surface), the high water level and the strong current now make works on the river too dangerous for their participants, and we decided to postpone them till more favorable conditions emerge," the diving club members noted.

So, the works on the bottom of the Volkhov river, planned for the end of January, can be done not earlier than in February 10-20 or 20-28.

The Novgorod divers started seeking the monument to emperor Alexander II on the bottom of the Volkhov river on January 18.

On that day the members of the diving club carried out reconnaissance on the river bottom in the historical centre of Veliky Novgorod.

As a result of the reconnaissance work, the divers who dived to a depth of more than 6 metres found on the Volkhov bottom a massive object which really looks like a monument to the Russian emperor in its shape.

If this object really proves to be a monument to tsar Alexander II variants of raising it will be worked out, the Novgorod diving club members said.

According to the archives information, the monument to emperor Alexander II in his full height was placed in the historical centre of Veliky Novgorod at the turn of the 20th century.

The pedestal of the monument bears the inscription to the Tsar-Liberator. The serfdom was abolished during the reign of Alexander II, and then a number of bourgeois reforms - the Zemstvo, judicial and military ones, which made for the development of capitalism in Russia, were carried out. Alexander II was killed by the members of clandestine terrorist organization of revolutionaries Narodnaya Volya on March 1, 1881.

On May 2, 1920, already in Soviet Russia, during a communist subbotnik, when a wave of the struggle against the monuments to tsarism was sweeping Russia, the stone monument was thrown from the landing pier into the Volkhov river.

In 2004 the Novgorod divers carried out hydroacoustic scanning of the river bottom. As a result of the scanning, a massive object was found not far from the place indicated in the archives materials.

The contours of this object, obtained as a result of the scanning, coincided with the parameters of the monument on the still existing prerevolution photographs.