PM Narendra Modi visits Soviet World War II memorial

MOSCOW: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a war memorial dedicated to Soviet soldiers killed in World War II.

The memorial is located at the Kremlin Wall in the Alexander Garden here.

The prime minister, braving cold weather, stood for a few minutes before the flame which illuminates a bronze inscription that reads "Your name is unknown, your deed is immortal" at the memorial.

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.

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.

The memorial 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.

The torch for the memorial's Eternal Flame was transported from Saint Petersburg where it had been lit from the Eternal Flame at 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, there is a granite alley made of porphyry plates with encapsulated soils from hero cities, Saint Petersburg, Kiev, Volgograd, Odessa, Sevastopol, Minsk, Kerch, Novorossiysk, Tula and Brest.

The plate for Volgograd has since been changed to Stalingrad, the city's name during the Second World War.