The Cathedral of Christ the Savior

I woke up and started reading more from Remnick's Resurrection. He wrote a little bit about the history of the Cathedral, and as I had just visited it Saturday, on May 9 for the holiday, I thought I would echo it here. He calls the story of the Cathedral of Christ of the Savior, "perhaps the most telling instance of magical realism, Russian style."

After Napoleon was defeated in 1812, Alexander I signed a manifesto declaring a contest among architects to design a cathedral to commemorate the great victory of the Russian people in gratitude to God for preserving Russia. The cathedral took decades to design and build and was consecrated in 1883. It was one of the most grandiose churches, with five gold domes, the highest as tall as a seventeen-story building. It contained fourteen bells in four seperate belfries, wich a combined weight of 65 tons. The cathedral had 12 doors and 177 marble panels describing the heroic battle with the French. A combination of battle scenes and traditional icons was intended to merge the history of the church and the history of Russia.

In the early 1920s, Lenin's campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church stopped services at the Cathedral, and 95% of churches in the city were destroyed. Priests were jailed, executed or co-opted by the state. Remnick relates that one priest was shot, had his tongue cut out, his eyes scooped from their sockets, and was shot and left to burn in a pile of manure. A tape relating the Cathedral's history stated, "Such was the state's struggle againt the 'opium of the people'" (a famous quote from Lenin). Lenin sent a secret telegram to his lackeys, that said, "Now when there are cannibalism and corpses in the street we must expropriate church valuables. Don't hesitate to kill any resisters. The more reactionary clergy we shoot now, the better: it will mean less resistance for decades thereafter."

The decisiont to destroy the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was made in secret, with the process begining by July 1931. First came the looting, with slabs of marble being wrenched from the walls, bells being cut down, crosses hacked out, and icons hauled off. Protesting priests were executed. Some of the marble ended up in benches in metro stations, or landed in museums like the Antireligious Ar Museum (and, oddly enough, Eleanor Roosevelt acquired the iconostasis and donated it to the Vatican). Nearly one thousand pounds of gold leaf was stripped from the domes, marble sculptures were hauled off with a rope around their necks, and thrown off of high places into the mud, where arms, legs, and wings were broken off. Gold crosses had the cupolas ripped off by tractors. On December 5, 1931, dynamite charges were set off to demolish the building. The first two charges failed to topple the building, with people saying that God had heard their prayers and would preserve the cathedral. The third charge, however, was successful and brought down the building. It took another five months of drilling and 18 months to carry off the 40 million bricks that had made up the cathedral. Protestors were silenced "in the most obvious ways," and demolition workers who had refused to be involved were sent to labor camps.

Stalin meant to replace the Cathedral (an archaic symbol in his eyes) with a monument to Lenin. He wanted it to tower over the Empire State Building and to embody the permanence and genius of the regime. As Alexander I had decreed a competition, so Stalin initiated one for what would be called the Palace of the Soviets. "And as the Terror began, as hillsides and riverbanks and city dumps and village compost heaps became the secret grave sites of countelss thousands of kulaks and 'wreckers' and 'conspirators' and 'enemies of the people,' Stalin identified the gorious shape that would now stand...He selected a design that can only be described as a Tower of Babel with Lenin on top." The design was eight meters higher than the Empire State Building, with a "spiraling confusion of stairs and columns and heights." The Lenin on top would be three times the size of the Statue of Liberty and would be surrounded by "the largest plaza in the world."

But, "Stalin's design to erase the old gods of man and establish bolshevism as the reigning faith--this precise attempt to destroy one temple and erect a new one on the old, holy ground--came to the most pathetic and banal of ends." The workers built a foundation for the Palace of the Soviets in 1938, but the area held dozens of nautral springs, and the foundation turned into a large, stagnant pool. The water delayed construction, which was further put off by the War. The steel of the foundation was stripped and used for railroads. "For years, the Palace of Soviets remained nothing more than that: a reeking pool surrounded by a wooden fence." In 1953, after Stalin's death, Khruschev decided to finish the palace to surpass the US in industrial modernism. The construction of the design, however, was deemed impossible and Khruschev turned in into an outdoor heated swimming pool,"the biggest in the world."

The Cathedral has since been rebuilt, with construction beginning on January 7--Orthodox Christmas--1995. State and private donations have gone toward rebuilding. Some donate because they are eager to have their old symbol back, others because it gives them access to certain privileges. Some call it "historical justice," others, "sacred...We want the fact of reconstruction to be symbolic of Russia's re-creation. We want our society to get together and be reborn as a great nation. The whole idea of rebuilding the Church unites us." Others simply wanted access to newly privatized properties from a grateful mayor...

David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia. New York, 1997, 169-174.