The monument is in the form of a two-meter cross of white, black and red marble.
Rostropovich's widow, the renowned opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, to whom he was married for more than 50 years, and their daughters attended the ceremony. A number of other cultural and political figures, including Russian culture minister, Alexander Avdeyev, were also present.
Rostropovich died of intestinal cancer on April 27, 2007, a month after he had celebrated his 80th birthday.
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, into a family of musicians, Rostropovich studied at the Moscow conservatory along with Soviet greats Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich.
He was forced into exile and deprived of his Soviet citizenship in the 1970s for supporting dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and criticizing the lack of artistic and intellectual freedom in his homeland.
