Moscow demolished a cathedral for a palace that was never finished
The Palace of the Soviets was meant to stand 416 metres tall, topped by a 100-metre Lenin, with a hall seating over 20,000. To clear the ground, Moscow blew up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Then war came, the steel was cut up for defences, and the would-be tallest structure on Earth was quietly abandoned.
Official Soviet history traced the idea to 30 December 1922, when Sergei Kirov proposed a national convention hall on the very day the Soviet Union was declared. In that era a palace meant a public building mixing leisure and administration, never a leader's home. A Vkhutemas student, Viktor Balikhin, suggested crowning a headquarters with a giant Lenin in 1924. The real project, first called the House of Congresses, was announced in February 1931; historians argue over whether Stalin or Alexei Rykov started it. It began modestly, but by summer it had swollen enough to be renamed.
Boris Iofan, back from Italy after studying under Armando Brasini and well connected to Rykov and Avel Yenukidze, made himself chief architect. He wrote the rules of the design contests and handled their paperwork, and archival work in the 2010s supported the old suspicion that the outcome was fixed from a plan he drafted on 6 February 1931. Many of his patrons and colleagues died in Stalin's purges; Iofan kept his job.
Planners first picked a cleared market area at Okhotny Ryad near the Kremlin. On 25 May 1931 the Politburo, prompted by Molotov and Voroshilov, chose the cathedral instead, although most technical advisers ranked that site worst. Stalin argued his case to selected architects on 2 June, the Politburo confirmed it on 5 June, and the cathedral was blown up in December. Historians still dispute whether the palace or the demolition was the true goal. Orthodox churches across the country dropped from 29,584 in 1927 to under 500 by 1940.
Iofan won four competitions held from 1931 to 1933, marking Soviet architecture's swing from radical modernism to grand historicism. His final scheme, developed with Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Helfreich and settled in 1937, stacked ribbed cylinders in a blend of Art Deco, Neoclassicism and American skyscraper engineering. Building started in 1933 and the foundation was done by January 1939, but the German invasion of June 1941 halted everything, and in 1942 the steel was taken down for fortifications and bridges. After the war Stalin lost interest, and a later Sparrow Hills version never left the drawing board.
Source: Palace of the Soviets
