On your left, look for a tall bronze cluster of human figures, rising almost like a column, with a globe topped by leafy branches lifted high above them.
If this spot feels oddly empty, that too belongs to the story: Helsinki moved World Peace into storage in August twenty twenty-two during the Kruunusillat tram works, and the plan is to return it close to this shoreline.
Few works in Helsinki show contested public memory quite so clearly. One object, one patch of waterfront, and suddenly a city starts arguing with itself. This statue has been mocked, cherished, politicised, attacked, defended, and reinterpreted so many times that its meaning never really sat still.
Moscow gave the sculpture to Helsinki, and sculptor Oleg Kirjuhin created it. He was no minor figure, but a celebrated Soviet artist, honoured with the title People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. In nineteen eighty-nine, the work arrived here in pieces, and Kirjuhin personally supervised the welding. On the fourteenth of January, nineteen ninety, only two months after the Berlin Wall fell, the statue was unveiled here at Hakaniemenranta. Kirjuhin lived just long enough to see that moment; he died the following year, and this stood among his last major public works.
The sculpture itself is six and a half metres high. Figures meant to represent different continents strain upward together, one hand supporting the globe, the other clenched in a fist. It is peace, yes, but not a delicate peace. It is muscular, declarative, almost confrontational. Kirjuhin insisted it was realist, not socialist realist - that official Soviet style that liked heroic bodies and clear, public messages. He even refused to label the central woman as capitalist or socialist. To him, she was simply a symbol of peace.
But public space rarely accepts “simply.” Helsinki and Moscow had agreed a statue exchange back in nineteen eighty-three. Helsinki sent Antti Neuvonen’s Children of Peace to Moscow. In return, this arrived after a long, bruising cultural argument. Helsinki had already refused one alternative: a Lenin statue. That refusal tells you everything about the nerves underneath the diplomacy. This was also one of several copies placed in Soviet cities, but Helsinki became the only site outside the Soviet Union to receive it, and apparently the last.
And so the arguments began in earnest. In two thousand and eight, newspaper readers voted it both the third ugliest and the third most beloved statue in Helsinki. That is almost perfect, isn’t it? When a monument divides opinion so sharply, what are people really judging: the bronze in front of them, the politics that delivered it, or their own memories of an era they do not fully trust?
People kept rewriting it. In nineteen ninety-one, student Mikael Jungner and two others tarred and feathered it, calling it ugly and out of place just as communism was collapsing in eastern Europe. In two thousand and ten, someone tried to blow it up with a gas cylinder. In later years, Ukrainian flags, anti-Putin signs, and graffiti gathered around its base. Each gesture tried to drag the statue into a new argument.
That is what makes this place so tense and so revealing. Here, the crossing is no longer only over water or bridge steel; it slips into ideology, embarrassment, grief, and stubborn memory. In a moment, continue to Hakaniemenranta, where the waterfront begins to speak in an older, rougher register beneath all this late twentieth-century symbolism. Like any public outdoor site, this stop is always open.
