THE ANALOGY with the shattering vision of Giovanni Battista Piranesi comes to mind.
THE SECOND ACT of the drama of the Temple of Christ the Savior begins. Until now the point has been to rob and ruin it; now it is to raze it to the ground. But here a real technical problem arises: how to tear down such a gigantic structure standing in the center of the city. It would be simplest to bomb it, but this is out of the question, since near the church are situated various embassies, and most important the Kremlin is not far away. What if the pilot were to miss?
They try hammers. But a hammer is useless here. How can one demolish with a hammer walls one hundred meters high, whose thickness exceeds three meters? There are of course sufficient stores of dynamite in the warehouses of the Red Army to place charges under the temple and blow up the entire structure. Yes, but what if one miscalculates and half the city is blown up, and — worst of all — the Kremlin?
In the end they decide (with great presence of mind) to go the route of experiment and experience. They drill a hole and put in a stick of explosives. A bang, a flash, dust rises. When the cloud settles, they gather round, look, measure how much was torn out. Now they drill a larger hole and put in two sticks. A correspondingly larger bang, a brighter flash, more dust. And so on, step after step, stick after stick, meter after meter. Now they knock down a piece of the cupola; now they blow up the summit of the belfry; now they crumble a fragment of a wall. They are counting on these shocks so rocking the entire edifice, so loosening and weakening its structure, that later one strong charge will suffice and the great temple will lie in ruins.
And what do the inhabitants of Moscow say about this? (There are three million of them at the time.) After all, it is their Basilica of St. Peter that is being torn down, their Cathedral of Notre-Dame, their Jasnogórski Monastery.
What do they say?
They say nothing.
Life goes on. In the morning adults hurry to work; children go to school; grandmothers go stand in lines. More and more frequently a family member is taken away, now a friend from work, now a neighbor.
Why, that’s life.
Only the residents of houses in the vicinity of the temple display a certain activity. In spare moments they walk out onto their balconies or clamber up to the roofs of their buildings and observe the work of the wreckers — the dynamiters and those who with hammers smash the statues of saints, the portals, and the cornices.
They look, watch, and remain silent, for what is there to say?
No one protests, demonstrates, pickets. And anyway, Koba† would not tolerate such things.
THE DEATH of the temple takes place on December 5, 1931.
Since morning the city has been rocked by powerful detonations. In the afternoon, a tall, smoking mountain of rubble lies where the church had stood. “A terrifying silence reigned in this place,” notes one of the witnesses of the event. A heavy cloud of smoke and dust hangs above Moscow. The only photograph that has survived from that day is so incompetent, so old and faded, that it is difficult even to see that it was already winter and whether or not there was snow.
A COMPETITION was immediately announced for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, which (as we recall) was to be erected precisely on the site of the Temple of Christ the Savior. From among the projects submitted Stalin at once selected the work of two architects — Yofon and Shchusev. It is impossible to determine today whether Stalin had earlier told them what he had in mind or whether Yofon and Shchusev themselves had simply surmised the secretary-general’s greatest ambition and fondest dream. In any case, the greatest ambition and fondest dream of Stalin was precisely the same as the greatest ambition and fondest dream of all Soviet leaders — namely, to catch up with and surpass the United States!
Of course, England is important, and France, and Germany, and Italy, but if one looks at the map of the world, these are all small countries, even very small ones. Only America is large. What sort of honor is it, for a power like the USSR, to surpass France? Surpassing America, on the other hand — yes, that is truly something!
Naturally Stalin understands that he cannot surpass America in something like highway construction or automobile production. But he believes that it is possible to identify areas in which, if one gathers all one’s resources, one can manage to catch up with the United States and then leave it behind! Following this thought, cleverly surmised by Yofon and Shchusev, he arrives at the conclusion that he could tweak America’s nose by the construction of a building larger than the largest edifice in the United States (which at the time is the Empire State Building in New York City) and — so as to bury America completely — he resolves to place atop this building a sculpture taller than the Statue of Liberty.
And so on June 4, 1933, he signs the go-ahead on Yofon and Shchusev’s design, thus launching his bold challenge to America. So: the Palace of the Soviets will be six times more massive than the Empire State Building, and crowning it will be a statue of Lenin three times higher (more than one hundred meters) and two and a half times heavier than the Statue of Liberty. Other impressive and head-spinning specifications also accepted by Koba:
• The height of the palace, together with the statue of Lenin at its top—415 meters (around 150 floors)
• The weight of the palace—1.5 million tons
• The capacity of the palace—7 million cubic meters, which equals the combined capacities of New York’s then six largest skyscrapers
The statue of Lenin:
• The length of the index finger of Vladimir Ilyich—6 meters
• The length of the foot—14 meters
• The width of the shoulders—32 meters
• The weight of the statue—6,000 tons
The plan included among other things the importation of faience sheets from Spain and majolica from Florence. In general a significant number of fittings were to be imported from abroad.
Let us remember the date, for it is relevant: June 1933.
June 1933 was one of those months when the fields and roads of the Ukraine were strewn with tens of thousands of corpses of people who had perished from hunger, and when there were incidents (today coming to light) of women, crazed with hunger and no longer cognizant of their actions, eating their own children. Moreover, they were dying of hunger not only in the Ukraine. They were dying also in the Volga region and in Siberia, in the Urals and by the White Sea.
Yes, all this was taking place simultaneously — the demolishing of the temple, the millions of people starving to death, the palace that was to eclipse America, and the cannibalism of those unfortunate mothers.
The construction of the Palace of the Soviets gives rise to two questions: First, why was it to be quite so enormous? Second, why was it to be erected precisely there, where the Temple of Christ the Savior had stood?
Why so enormous, we already know — the point was to catch up with and overshadow. But why this location? (Let us add that the temple stood on extremely poor ground, shifting, unstable, porous, constantly underrun by water. It was treacherous soil for building on, unreliable, and meant doubling the costs of every investment, although costs, it is true, were of no significance.)
The explanation that atheism now ruled, that a struggle was being waged with religion, that churches and monasteries were being closed, was of course correct, but it didn’t account for everything. After all, there are countless churches in Moscow; there are even churches in the Kremlin, and yet the Leader’s finger came to rest on just this one place, where there towered the spectacular silhouette of the temple built by the czars of Greater Russia to thank God for forcing Napoleon to retreat and saving their Imperium.