Iosif Poniatowski

Iosif Iosifovich Poniatowski, also Józef, was born on January 19, 1925, in Tikhoretsk, now in Krasnodar Krai, Russia, and died on March 19, 1985, in Chișinău (Kishinev). He entered the Mukhina school in Leningrad in 1945, in the faculty of architecture and decorative sculpture, and came to Chișinău in 1953.

From 1955 he worked on the protection of architectural monuments for the government of the MSSR, and from 1957 he headed its department of monuments of material culture. In 1960 he co-wrote a book on Moldovan architecture of the 14th to 19th centuries with Kir Rodnin.

With Oleksandr Maiko he made the six stone reliefs of the Eternity memorial (1975). With Maiko and Leonid Fitov he made the monument to the Fighters for Soviet Power in Chișinău (1966). Some English-language sources give his initial as A. Russian-language sources give I. I.

The national catalog of public monuments credits him and Fitov with the bust of Constantin Stamati in Ocnița (1957). The same catalog names Lazar Dubinovsky and Fyodor Naumov as the authors of the Fighters for Soviet Power monument, against the Russian-language sources.