Beatles Monument in Yekaterinburg

The Beatles monument in Yekaterinburg is a set of cast-iron silhouettes of John, Paul, George and Ringo fixed to a red brick wall in a courtyard by ulitsa Gorkogo 8, on the Iset embankment below the Malysheva Street bridge. Local fans of the Ural Beatles Club paid for it, and it opened on 23 May 2009.

A fan club project, not a city commission

The Ural Beatles Club came up with the monument. Artist Vadim Okladnikov drew the concept, which the club called "Beatles on the Wall". The city did not pay for it. Club members raised 2.5 million roubles over roughly six years, mostly from music marathons and auctions, according to Nash Ural.

The paperwork started years before any metal was poured. The club's archive includes the protocol of a Yekaterinburg urban planning council meeting on 26 November 2004 and a decree from the head of the city approving a "decorative composition" dedicated to the Beatles. Sources disagree on the architect: Wikipedia names Artyom Alendeyev, the club credits Alendeyev and Andrey Koshcheyev for the courtyard design, and the city's Red Line route page gives A. S. Chirkovsky.

Cast in Mikhailovsk, mounted in 2008

The four figures were cast at a factory in Mikhailovsk, a small town in the south of Sverdlovsk Oblast. Nash Ural reports that Lennon's silhouette was cast on his birthday. They are flat profiles, slightly larger than life, set into the brickwork rather than standing in front of it. One English travel listing calls them copper, but the club, Nash Ural and Russian Wikipedia all say cast iron.

The club photographed the figures going up on the wall on 18 October 2008. The courtyard then waited seven months for its opening.

The opening with The Quarrymen

The monument was unveiled at noon on 23 May 2009, during the first Eurasian festival "The Beatles on the Border", held in Yekaterinburg from 22 to 24 May. The Quarrymen, the Liverpool group John Lennon formed in 1957, came at the club's invitation. Accounts of the moment itself differ. Nash Ural and Wikipedia say members of The Quarrymen pulled the cover off. The club's own report describes four of the monument's creators pulling down the camouflage cloth after speeches from club members and architects.

Russian sources call it the first Beatles monument in Russia. It was not the first in the former Soviet Union: a Beatles group in Donetsk went up in 2006, and the Beatles monument in Almaty also came earlier.

What has been added since

For the tenth anniversary, in May 2019, the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore opened a Beatles exhibition with the club and the British consulate in Yekaterinburg. It showed fans' drawings and the story of how the monument was built.

On 18 November 2021 a second artwork arrived in the same courtyard. British street artist James Cochran, known as Jimmy C, painted a Beatles Wall mural measuring 12 by 3 metres. Over the years the brick wall has also collected graffiti for other musicians who died, including Kurt Cobain, Lil Peep and Chester Bennington.

Finding it on the Red Line

The monument is stop 31 on the Red Line, Yekaterinburg's self-guided walking route, and a numbered sign marks it. A line from the Beatles song "The End" is lettered on the wall beside the figures. The Keyboard monument is also on this stretch of the Iset embankment.