The Rodina Statue as seen during the Victory Day celebrations on May 9. The city of Volgograd was established more than 400 years ago, primarily because of its location at the crossroads of both land and waterways. It has experienced three changes in its name during that time: first it was Tsaritsyn, then it was Stalingrad, and then Volgograd after Stalin fell out of favor during the regime of Nikita Khrushchev.

The monument: An indoor shrine to the fallen topped by one of the largest statues on earth.

Why to go: The Nazis, with their audaciously stupid notions of racial superiority, never understood the Russians. It was a failure that cost them the war. By late 1941, after the Wehrmacht had demolished several Russian armies and had captured 3 million prisoners of war, the Germans were convinced that they were on the verge of victory over the Soviet Union.

What they had not counted on was Russia’s size and determination. With 5,000 miles of hinterland to fall back into, a population more than twice the size of Germany’s and full knowledge of the barbarities the Germans were already inflicting on the Belorussians and Ukrainians, the Russians gambled that they could exchange territory and massive losses of soldiers for time to build a counteroffensive. But, first, they had to stop the Germans at some decisive point.

In summer of 1942, the Germans decided to focus on what they perceived as a weak point on the Eastern Front, and concentrated their offensive on Stalingrad (née Volgograd), an industrial city that stretched for almost 70 miles along narrow bench land on the western bank of the Volga River. East of the river lay the vast steppes, perfect terrain for German armies seeking to sweep on to the great industrial city of Magnitogorsk 700 miles beyond or to perform a decisive thrust to the north that could cut Moscow off from its factories to the east. So began the five-and-a-half-month siege of Stalingrad, the bitterest battle of attrition ever fought. The Russians lost 1 million men in its defense (some sources say 2 million), and said later they would have sacrificed thrice that many to keep the Germans from advancing.

Stop them they did. In hand-to-hand fighting so horrific that no other account in the annals of warfare exceeds it, the Red Army handed the fabled Wehrmacht its first major defeat, and signaled to the rest of Russia and the world beyond that it just might be possible to stop Hitler.

The Russians lost 30 million people in WWII, most of them in the struggle against the Germans. (Several million perished at the hands of their own leader, Stalin, who filled the gulags with ethnic groups he suspected of being faint of heart against the Germans.) The war was the most catastrophic event in Russian history. When it came time to build monuments to that war, the one at Stalingrad became the most important.

The monument is melodramatic in the oversized way that only the Russians seem to be able to pull off. At the Hall of Valor, a giant torch-bearing forearm and hand, covered in gilt, rises from a rock floor at the base of a spiral ramp that takes visitors up past walls carved with the names of those who fell at Stalingrad.

The masterpiece of the monument is Rodina – “Motherland” in Russian – a freestanding 8,000-ton steel and concrete statue that rears 257 feet high. It is more than 100 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty itself, and almost as high as the Statue of Liberty and its base combined. The grim-faced Rodina, her scarf billowing behind her, brandishes a 95-foot-long sword at the enemies of the motherland while her other arm extends in invitation to her sons ands daughters to follow her and defend Russia.

The monuments, an ensemble, perch on a low hill that looks down on the long-since-rebuilt city, once again called Volgograd. In this vast country there were other epic battles that took place, including the dramatic hurling back of the Wehrmacht from the gates of Moscow on December 8, 1941, and the great tank and artillery duel at Kursk on July 4, 1943. But in the hearts of most Russians, it was the insanely brave stand at Stalingrad that epitomized the lengths to which Rodina’s children were willing to go to defend her.

What to add to the journey: River trips up the Volga take travelers into the great green heart of Russia, alternating between woodlands and vast farms. Don’t head downriver: The Volga empties into the Caspian Sea, whose shrinking shoreline and heavy industrial poisons have combined to create one of the great ecological disasters of the modern era.