Amid great fanfare, the bronze equestrian statue of Emperor Alexander III was installed last week on a pedestal in the courtyard of St. Petersburg's Marble Palace.


Exiled for 50 years somewhere in the backyard of the Russian museum, the statue has not been exhibited or shown since 1937.


With amazed admiration, crowds watched the 5.5 meter statue carried through the streets of St. Petersburg. Every day, many people came to see the resurrected statue for the first time, some even bearing flowers. The reopening of a nearly forgotten monument was hailed as an historic event by both local and national media.


It should be said, however, that the monument, highly acclaimed as a masterpiece of sculpture now, was met with mixed reaction when unveiled in 1909. Sculptural impressionist Apollon Trubetskoy's creation looked heavy, static -- a striking contrast to the famous "flying" Bronze Horseman of Peter the Great or the rearing and elegant horse of Nicholas I. In 1919 a satirical verse by revolutionary proletarian poet Demyan Bedny was inscribed on the pedestal, and the word "scarecrow" from the poem stuck to the sculpture as an irreverent nickname. In 1937 the statue was removed and during the Soviet years was largely forgotten, a discarded "scarecrow" indeed.


The triumphant comeback would have been complete if the monument had taken up its original site in Znamenskaya Ploshchad outside the Moscow Station. But the old name has not yet been returned to the square, still called Ploshchad Vosstania, and since 1985 the site has been occupied by a pompous Soviet-style World War II memorial obelisk which people disdainfully call the stameska (chisel).


Although the plaque says the Marble Palace is only a temporary location, the general feeling is that it will be a long time, if ever, before the stameska goes and the bronze Alexander can return.


Uprooting the World War II memorial is not going to be as easy as knocking Dzerzhinsky or Lenin off their pedestals was.


Speaking of pedestals, the one upon which Alexander and his horse sit has a history of its own. The pedestal, small and unassuming, is somewhat like that "sacred place" which "is never empty," recalling the Russian proverb "sviatoye mesto pusto ne byvayet." Sacred or not, it stubbornly would not stay bare. It was stripped of the famous Bronevik, Lenin's armored car, which had been sitting there for more than 50 years but in 1991 was removed to the vaults of the Museum of Artillery. For a few months in 1994 the pedestal served as a platform for a somewhat scandalous, art-cum-commercial installation of a Ford automobile.