89 years ago today in 1931, while peasants starved by the thousands in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside.

 89 years ago today in 1931, while peasants starved by the thousands in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside, in the heart of Moscow, one of Stalin’s most devoted servants, Lazar Moisevich Kaganovich, had the huge Cathedral of Christ the Saviour dynamited and reduced to rubble. From the wreckage of the great Tsarist church, the Bolsheviks intended to build a cathedral in their own image which would reflect the grandeur of the modern age and stand as a glorious beacon to the workers of the world (model of the proposed Palace of the Soviets pictured).

Much like the iconic St. Basil’s Cathedral built by Ivan the Terrible in commemoration of his conquest of Kazan, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was also built in celebration of Russia’s military triumphs. The victory in question was that over Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812. 

From the moment the Napoleonic legions had departed Moscow, Tsar Alexander I had proclaimed his willingness to honour Christ the Saviour and the sacrifices of his people by raising up a new cathedral “to signify Our gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from the doom that overshadowed Her". 

Initially intended to be built along Neoclassical lines with heavy use of masonic symbolism, this design was shelved when Alexander’s deeply pious and patriotic brother, Nicholas I, rose to the throne.

 The new Tsar instead gave his blessing for a design that mirrored that of the great Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. 

Construction thus only began in 1839 and did not finish until 1860 – by which time Nicholas I was dead and his son Alexander II was on the throne – and continued to be decorated for another two decades thereafter. It was not consecrated until 1883 when Alexander III was being crowned.

The Cathedral sported a gigantic dome gilded with gold. Its walls were inlaid with marble and granite. 

Over a thousand square meters of Carrara Bianca marble plaques were displayed upon the walls commemorating all the commanders and regiments and battles fought during the 1812 Campaign.

 The ground floor itself was ringed by a two-floor gallery. Upon its completion it was one of the biggest Orthodox churches in the world. It stood as a titanic monument to the patriotic and religious ideals of the late Tsarist state. 

For all its splendour and glory however, it was only open for religious worship for a little over 30 years before the Revolution of 1917 brought the whole Orthodox Tsarist world crashing down. 

With the demise of the Romanovs came the rise of the Bolsheviks who adopted a severe and forceful policy of state atheism.

During and after the years of the Civil War the Orthodox Church, along with other religious sects, were ruthless persecuted. And where the Bolsheviks did not persecute, they mocked and humiliated.

 Pious Russian peasants were deliberately taken on airplane trips to prove to them that there were no angels in the clouds.

 A depiction was circulated of a pregnant Virgin Mary promoting Soviet abortion policies.

 Religious festivals were replaced by new Soviet ones such as Electrical Day and Foresters’ Day. 

Throughout this period, while the Church’s beliefs and its flock fell prey to Bolshevik brutality, the Cathedral building itself remained intact. Even before Lenin’s death in 1924 however, the seeds of its demise were being planted. 

At the Congress of the Soviets, Sergei Kirov had called for a congress palace that would supplant those of the emperors and nobles of old.

 He declared that all the existing halls would soon be too small to house all the delegates from all the component republics of the Soviet Union. 

It would serve as “another push for the European proletariat, still dormant to realize that we came for good and forever, that the ideas of communism are as deeply rooted here as the wells drilled by Baku oilers".  

When Lenin died in 1924, a proposal was put forward to place a statue of the deceased leader atop the dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

 Though these two proposals were largely fell to the wayside over the decade which followed, they would return to the foreground as Stalin came to power.

Under its new dictator, the Soviet Union underwent enormous changes as economic modernisation was pushed forth at breakneck speed. 

In this environment of radical transformation, the Cathedral fell prey to the eyes of the Secret Police who identified its golden dome as an “unnecessary luxury of the Soviet Union” which would be better served to fund the efforts of the economic plan. 

With Rusia being modernised moreover it was only right that the country have a new modern capital to reflect this.

 In that capital, the Cathedral had no place. Stalin tasked Moscow’s remodelling to his faithful Jewish comrade, Lazar Kaganovich.

 Originally a cobbler, Kaganovich was a veteran Bolshevik who was happiest when he had a hammer in his hand smashing the old world into oblivion. 

Nicknamed by Stalin as ‘Iron Lazar’, he was known as “The Locomotive” to his contemporaries for his explosive energy and was considered by some to be more Stalinist than Stalin himself. 

To this tireless champion of the Bolshevik regime, the Cathedral fell prey. 

Demolition began in August 1931 and was completed four months later with the final detonation of dynamite.

 It took two rounds of explosions to reduce the Tsarist structure to rubble. It would take a full year to clear the rubble away. 

The Cathedral’s benches were distributed for use in Moscow’s new metro stations.

The Palace of the Soviets which was set to replace the Cathedral was to be a monster of a building.

 Its crowning feature was to be its huge skyscraper tower over four hundred metres in height with a statue of Lenin at the summit.

 Beneath this, the main hall alone was to have walls over a hundred metres high and was to house more than twenty thousand seats. Not unlike Hitler’s Volkshalle, the building stands as a testament to the megalomania of totalitarianism – the belief that through sheer will power anything at all can be achieved. 

The chief difference between the two however is that Hitler never started construction of his towering temple. 

In 1937 construction of the Palace actually began and by 1939 the foundations were complete.

 The project however ran into continual problems not only with funding but flooding from the nearby river.

When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 all construction was halted and much of the steel frame was used for fortifications instead.

 The project thereat was abandoned and in 1958 Khrushchev ordered that the foundation hole be used instead to create the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. 

In 1990, when the Soviet Union itself lay close to death, the Orthodox Church received permission to rebuild the old Cathedral. 

After the formation of the Russian Federation, the Church’s position was largely restored and over a million Muscovites gave donations towards the Cathedral’s reconstruction.  

Since its return to the Moscow skyline, the Cathedral has had the Romanov family canonized there, has had Boris Yeltsin lie in state there, and in 2012 it was the chosen venue of the radical feminist group Pussy Riot to stage a protest against the Vladimir Putin.