The Eternal Flame of Glory at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier - Kremlin Wall, Moscow

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a war memorial, dedicated to the Soviet soldiers killed during The Great Patriotic War. The term Great Patriotic War (22 Jun 1941 – 9 May 1945) appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda on 23 June 1941, just a day after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It was found in the title of "The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet People". It is a tradition for newly married couples in Moscow to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The Tomb is located at the Kremlin Wall in the Alexander Garden in Moscow. The remains of the unknown soldiers killed in the Battle of Moscow in 1941 were initially buried in a mass grave of the Shtyki Memorial at the 40th km of the Leningrad highway at the city of Zelenograd. This was the location of the closest approach of the German armies to Moscow during the war. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the battle, in December 1966 these remains were relocated to the Kremlin Wall.The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was designed by architects D. I. Burdin, V. A. Klimov, Yu. R. Rabayev and sculptor Nikolai Tomsky, and was unveiled to the public on May 8, 1967.

The dark red porphyry monument is decorated with a bronze sculpture of a laurel branch and a soldier's helmet laid upon a banner. In front of the monument, there is a five-pointed star in a square field of labradorite, which emanates the Eternal Flame from its center. The flame illuminates a bronze inscription "Имя твоё неизвестно, подвиг твой бессмертен" , "Your name is unknown, your deed is immortal"). The torch for the memorial's Eternal Flame was transported from Leningrad, where it had been lit from the Eternal Flame at the Monument to the Fighters of the Revolution on the Field of Mars. To the left of the tomb is a granite wall with an inlay stating: "1941 - To Those Who Have Fallen For The Motherland - 1945".

To the right of the tomb, lining the walkway are dark red porphyry blocks with incapsulated soils from hero cities, Leningrad, Kiev, Stalingrad, Odessa, Sevastopol, Minsk, Kerch, Novorossiysk, Tula and Brest, Murmansk and Smolensk. The plate for “Stalingrad” read “Volgograd” until September 2004. Further to the right of these monuments is an obelisk in red granite, listing the names of 40 “Cities of Military Glory” divided into groups of four. This monument was dedicated on May 8, 2010.

In memory of Guy Somerfield of York