Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
Golden-domed Orthodox cathedral, dynamited under Stalin and rebuilt on the site of a former open-air swimming pool.
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About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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