Field of Mars

This guide to the Field of Mars in Saint Petersburg traces how a drained swamp behind the Summer Garden became an eighteenth-century parade ground so dusty that Petersburgers nicknamed it the Sahara, then a mass grave for the dead of the February 1917 revolution. It follows the granite monument raised over roughly one hundred eighty coffins within two years, carved with lines by the new government's own commissar of culture. Best heard while walking the square's open ceremonial lawns.