Sculpture group
dedicated to MADI teachers and students who died in the Great Patriotic War
The sculptural group made of bronze depicts three Soviet soldiers. The figures are mounted on a cylindrical pedestal with a truncated end. In the central part of the pedestal there is a sculptural relief depicting military scenes. The dedicatory inscription is: “In memory of teachers and students of MADI who fell in the battles for their Motherland.” Moscow Automobile and Road Institute, now it is MADI–GTU (State Technical University), in the difficult years of the Great Patriotic War, by order of the Council of People’s Commissars, continued training personnel for the automobile and road troops. The war made its own adjustments to the organization of the educational process. On November 3, 1941, by order of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR No. 10040, undergraduate students were exempted from performing and defending diploma projects and on the basis of a certificate of completion in the first semester of the 1940/41 academic year of the full theoretical course of the Institute, they were assigned the specialty “engineer–builder of highways”. Their graduation works were built airfields, restored roads, repaired bridges. The number of engineering and technical tasks solved by each of them would be enough for several diplomas. With the beginning of the war, instead of training camps, a team of five units: fire–fighting, emergency recovery, chemical protection, sanitary–medical and law enforcement — switched to wartime mode. Yevgeny Romanovich Sidorenko, a teacher of the military physical education department, who was the soul and organizer of the entire military life of the institute, was appointed as the commander of the team. In the autumn of 1941, during the fierce fighting near Moscow, the team was transferred to a barracks position with round-the-clock duty at the facility. From the first days of the war, many teachers and students of MADI volunteered for cadre units, the People’s militia and fighter battalions. Junior students were sent to fortified areas to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches. At the institute there was a “transit” part of students arriving from construction sites and waiting for an appointment. More than 300 students and teachers of MADI immediately joined the ranks of the defenders of Moscow. In total, during 1941-1942, about 700 students, 85 employees, 5 graduate students and 30 teachers were mobilized or volunteered for the front.
Address: Moscow, Leningradsky Ave., 64 (territory of the Moscow Automobile and Road State Technical University-MADI)
