Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

This guide to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow follows the building through three lives: raised as a nineteenth-century victory vow after Napoleon's defeat, dynamited by Stalin in 1931 to clear ground for a planned four-hundred-meter Palace of the Soviets, and turned by Khrushchev into the world's largest open-air swimming pool. It traces the war that stalled Stalin's tower and the decades Muscovites swam above the ruins before the cathedral rose again in the 1990s. Picture the crowds who once paddled through Moscow blizzards on this very spot.