Make Way for America
The Make Way for Ducklings statue itself is a very Boston, as in Boston, United States of America commodity. It was originally designed by Nancy Schon about the popular children's book of the same name published about Boston. The statue's signficance in Moscow however is much more international and broader than a children's picture book.
The replica was given to Raisa Gorbechev by Barbara Bush in 1991 following the recent 1991 collapse of the USSR. Gorbechev's acceptance of it and putting it into Moscow's part is highly symbolic of the new identity Moscow was taking on: an international city ready to be part of the Western world. Soviet Moscow would never take a gift given by the first lady of the United States, but the new Moscow was. Therefore, the simple Bostonian statue was one of the first superficially small but symbolicially significant shows of Moscow's new identity in the fall of the Soviet Union and the turn of the 21st century.
Schon, Nancy. "Make Way for Ducklings, Moscow, by Nancy Schön." Make Way for Ducklings, Moscow, by Nancy Schön. Nancy Schon, n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.
""Make Way for Ducklings," Moscow, Russia." International Travel News. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.