Petersburg Workshop Casting Russian Rulers in Wax

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: December 14, 2012 (Issue # 1739)

A St. Petersburg workshop is crafting wax figures of Russian rulers past and present for an exhibit ordered by the presidential administration.

The project, which is financed by an unidentified private fund, has been running for several years and won't be completed for several more, Andrei Arsenyev, director of the Russky Vityaz workshop, told Interfax on Thursday.

The workshop has made 30 figures so far, each of them 30 centimeters in height. Among the finished figures are five of President Vladimir Putin and others depicting Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and Russia's 20th-century leaders.

A gallery of some of the figures is available here.

Each figure takes four months to produce and costs between 300,000 and 450,000 rubles ($10,000 to 15,000). The figures will be displayed either at a newly built museum or at an existing one.

In December 2011, President Dmitry Medvedev presented his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev with a chess set crafted by the same workshop, the workshop said on its website.

The workshop primarily makes tin miniatures dedicated to military and historical subjects.