Moscow City Hall will spend 45 million rubles on a monument to Kobzon

According to Interfax with reference to the press service of the mayor's office, the monument will be erected in the square of Arms Lane. They want to appoint the grand opening of the monument on August 30 - the artist's memorial day.

The monument will be the third memorial symbol in honor of Kobzon in Moscow. A memorial plaque has already been placed on the building of the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music, and an unnamed passage in the Khoroshevo-Mnevniki area was named Iosif Kobzon Embankment in memory of the artist.

The first monument to Kobzon was opened during his lifetime in 2003 near the Youth Palace in Donetsk. The monument was opened on the day of the artist's 66th birthday, Kobzon, as a native of Donetsk, attended the celebration. In 2017, a monument to Kobzon appeared in the village of Aginsky, the administrative center of the Aginsky Buryat District of the Trans-Baikal Territory, from where he was elected to the State Duma.

In 2019, a monument to Joseph Kobzon was installed at the main entrance of the Institute of Theater Arts. Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin came to the opening of another monument on his grave. He recalled that his colleague was a member of the lower house of parliament of six convocations and urged to keep the memory of the singer's work and deeds.

In 2020, the project to install a monument to Kobzon for 52 million budget rubles in the Tverskoy district of Moscow, next to the monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, caused a scandal.

Voters criticized the initiative of the city authorities, saying that the city in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has something to spend that kind of money on. People called it a disgrace to try to extract a huge amount from the budget. Citizens were indignant that seriously ill children were collecting money from the whole world, and things of no paramount importance were purchased with budget funds.

Social media users offered to organize an honest vote on what the people need more: a monument to Kobzon or new hospitals. In honor of the artist, they suggested naming a music school and limiting it to this.

Voters specified that not everyone approves of the artist's work. And if the artist's fans want another monument, then it would be wiser to pay for it not from the budget, but from private donations from citizens who are interested in this. This practice is widespread throughout the world.

However, the deputies of the Moscow City Duma decided to approve the monument to Kobzon, which subsequently gave the mayor's office the right to allocate money for its construction.

Meanwhile, the project of the monument caused a lot of criticism from the townspeople.

“Very soon, not far from the Museum of Decorative Arts and the monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, a monument to Joseph Kobzon will appear. It's like one of the projects. Courage to you, residents of the Tver region..."

Head of Professor Kobzon. It would be necessary to limit the age of access, a weak mind may not be able to cope.

“Some people advise just erecting a monument to Kobzon’s wig – it seems to me that this will never be demolished”, - Muscovites wrote about the project of the monument.

People's Artist of the USSR Iosif Kobzon died on August 30, 2018 at the age of 81.