The past twentieth century was a continuous series of hardships and hardships for the Russian people, which cost the lives of millions of people. Apart from the Great Patriotic War, the greatest number of casualties is associated with the era of the Great Terror of the 1930s. During these years, the Soviet Union arrested about 1,700,000 people for political reasons, 700,000 of whom were shot. It is estimated that about a thousand citizens were killed every day in the country. These repressions, however, on a much smaller scale, continued throughout the entire existence of the USSR. A huge number of people suffered in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, which has always been the cultural and intellectual capital of Russia. In memory of the people who suffered innocently during these terrible years, sculptor M. M. Shemyakin designed by architects V. B. Bukhaeva and A. N. Vasilyeva created a monument to victims of political repression.

The location on the Neva embankment, where this monument is erected, was chosen for a reason — it is located right in front of the famous Kresty prison, which in those years was a symbol of the hated system for Leningraders. The monument is based on figures of two sphinxes made of bronze, repeating statues that are symbolic for St. Petersburg. Sphinxes are installed on granite pedestals, located at a distance of a couple of meters against each other. When you look at the monument, you immediately feel a heavy feeling of anxiety and stiffness, which is due to the excessively high planting of the head of the sphinxes. Mythical creatures are painfully thin, with protruding ribs. However, the most terrible feelings are caused by the heads of the sphinxes and their faces: ordinary profiles of female faces are facing residential buildings, and the part that looks at the Crosses is naked, eaten by time skull.

Such details of the sculptures are very symbolic. Thus, the author conveyed the idea of the close existence of extreme manifestations of human nature: life and death, carefree happiness and mortal difficulties, freedom and bondage. This was the main idea of existence in those years. The figures of the sphinxes are surrounded by plates fixed on pedestals, which are engraved with lines of works by famous authors of that era, many of whom were victims of persecution: Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Nikolay Zabolotsky, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky. On the parapet of the embankment, between the sphinxes, four blocks made of granite are installed in the form of a prison window.