ABSTRACT
This is the story of a certain site in the city of Moscow, a site which is known to the Western reader, if at all, as that of the abortive Palace of the Soviets. But the story does not begin there. Nor does it end with the abandonment of the project. For up until 1931 the site had been occupied by Russia’s largest Orthodox church – the cathedral of Christ the Saviour; this structure was subsequently demolished in order to make way for the proposed Palace of the Soviets,
but this project was never completed, and by 1960 the site had been given over to an enormous open-air swimming pool. This in turn was demolished in 1996 in order to make way for the reconstruction of the original cathedral.
