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The decision to destroy the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was made in secret, and by July 1931 secret-police operatives and young Komsomol workers began the process through a gigantic looting operation. They wrenched huge slabs of marble off the walls, cut down the bells from the bellfries, pried off the crosses and the icons. Finally, on December 5, 1931, demolition experts set off a series of high-explosive charges to finish the job.
The Palace and the pool - the largest in the world Stalin's intention was to replace the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (a symbol, for him, of the archaic) with the Palace of Soviets, so enormous that it would tower over the greatest symbol of modernity at the time, the Empire State Building. The officially accepted project was submitted by B.Iofan, in competition with many others, including Le Corbusier. The principal elements of the palace were: a huge Statue of Lenin (325 feet high), a pedestal - superstructure composed of three receding tiers of cylindrical masses (housing several museums), and an enormous substructure (sort of a stylobate), housing the main and secondary auditoriums. The lower and underground stories were given over to traffic handling, storage and complex technical equipment. The designers were striving to give the huge structure a quality of lightness and suppleness, and to achieve a cumulative effect of upward soaring. The projected structure was supposed to top every known building in the world. Its height, including the statue, was about 1365 feet. The building was sponsored to celebrate the achivements of the first Five-Year Plan. It was to go facing the Kremlin, on the opposite side of the Moscva River, and to be used for political meetings and congresses. Stalin's design came to the most banal of ends. The foundation soon became an enormous and stagnant pool. What was delayed by water would soon be put off indefinitely by World War II. For years the Palace of Soviets remained nothing more than a reeking sump surrounded by a wooden fence. After Stalin's death his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, decided to convert the construction site into what it had been for years. He ordered the construction of an outdoor heated swimming pool. "The biggest in the world". The resurrection of the Cathedral, six decades after Soviets removed all traces of the original, was begun on Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1995. The exterior should be completed this year, the 850th anniversary of the city, and it will be near-exact copy of the original. As soon as the services in the Cathedral become regular it will get the official status of the main cathedral in Russia.
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