Tin Tits and the Great Patriotic War Museum

So from almost everywhere in Kiev you can see this huge statue of Rodina Mat, or the Nation’s Mother. It’s a woman holding a shield and a sword, 20 stories tall, and finished in shiny tin. The locals call her tin tits. There is also a museum about World War II, or the Great Patriotic war (as they called it in the USSR), in the base of the statue. It is located in a big park that is very Soviet Union style. There is a very large concrete square, imposing statues of soldiers fighting, some tanks, and soviet music blaring on loudspeakers everywhere. There is also a big eternal flame at the top of a hill. We climbed up to the park from the river down below after we visited the Lavra. There was a lot of stairs, but we made it. The square was quite hilarious and we took our picture with the statue, the tanks, and monuments to Moscow.

We paid about $1.50 to enter the museum, which was also very soviet style with cavernous display halls. Like any typical museum, the museum had displayed every random article they had in the collection in no particular order. The displays were all in Russian and Ukrainian. I didn’t get a lot out of the descriptions, but it was still obvious to see the affect of WWII on Ukraine. There were many concentration camps here, and millions of Jews were killed, even in Kiev. Ukraine was located in the middle of fighting as Russia moved across Europe.

I’ve been to a couple museums in Europe now that have shown a lot of information and about the significance of the Holocaust and the influence of WWII in Europe. I don’t think we understand or appreciate it as much in North America. There are buildings here that were bombed and shot up during the war. There are Holocaust memorials and even a memorial to a concentration camp close to the city centre of Kiev. It will be interesting to see if there are similar museums and memorials after the conflicts in the Middle East and other places.