I promised a while ago to write about the history of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. This is the place that a group of pseudo-feminists in Russia has defiled as part of its self-promotion strategy. As I said before, you have to be a real hater of the Russian culture to vandalize a cathedral with such a painful and tragic history.
The foundations of the Cathedral were laid down to commemorate Russia’s defeat of the invading Napoleonic troops in 1812. For decades, people from all over the country donated money (often as little as a few kopecks) to create this beautiful work of art. This was a huge project for such a miserably poor country. Only in 1883 was the Cathedral finally finished and consecrated. For seventy years (which is the same number of years that the USSR managed to exist), people saved and donated money, while the most outstanding Russian artists worked on decorating the cathedral. It became a symbol of Russian creativity and a beacon for all Russian Orthodox believers.
After the death of Lenin, Stalin, who wanted to eradicate every vestige of religious feeling and put his own brand of religious Communism in its place, decided to demolish the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He was planning to erect a temple to the Communist God, Lenin, in its place. It was going to be called “The Palace of the Soviets.” You can see in the picture on the right what it was going to look like.
In 1931, the cathedral was demolished. Remember that the Cathedral had been filled with frescoes by the leading Russian artists of the XIXth century. You do not need to be religious to appreciate the barbarity of this destructive act. One of the goals of the Nazis was to destroy the cultural heritage of the Slavic peoples. The Soviet Communists had started this project long before Hitler even came up with this plan.
It took almost a year to clear all the rubble from the site. Then, the construction of the Communist Temple began.
It never managed to progress beyond the attempts to lay the foundations, though. The site where a humongous cathedral had stood for years with no problems whatsoever suddenly started to get flooded. Stalin exterminated several groups of architects and engineers but nothing could be done. The flooding continued. For the religious people, it was a sign that God was not going to allow this site to be defiled by the Palace of the Soviets. Soon, the project was abandoned.
In 1992, the Russian Orthodox Church started collecting money to rebuild the Cathedral. Once again, people from all over the country began to donate money for the construction. These were the years of great poverty for the Russian people, yet they found money for this testament to their desire to salvage their cultural heritage from complete oblivion.The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was consecrated in 2000.
I hope that now everybody understands why it bothers me so much that the pseudo-progressive Western media are glorifying a bunch of money-hungry idiots who vandalized this place of worship with its unique and painful history.
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