Absurd Intellectual

This is a drawing of the planned Palace of the Soviets, a massive structure designed in the 1930s as a showcase and bureaucratic centre for the Russian government. It would have been the largest building on Earth, but when the Germans invaded in 1941, the foundation had to be cannibalized to build Moscow’s defenses.

Later, some of the building’s steel was used to build bridges, and the structure languished until the late 1950s, when it was finally cleared and the hole dug for it was turned into what was then the world’s largest open-air swimming pool.

It’s part of a slideshow of massive, never-built skyscrapers that you can check out here, but it was the story of the Palace of the Soviets that really caught my eye.

The site was once home to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, originally ordered built on the orders of Alexander I in gratitude for Napoleon’s retreat, but profoundly changed when his brother, the much-more-Orthodox Nicholas I, succeeded him.

That cathedral saw the debut of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but after the Russian Revolution, it was demolished to make way for the Palace of the Soviets — and it took a year to haul the rubble away.

After the Palace was never built, and after Muscovites tired of the swimming pool, what happened? Well, they rebuilt the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour — an exact replica.

You cannot make this up.