A Moscow 'miracle' for the new tsars

By Renfrey Clarke MOSCOW — For Josef Stalin in 1931 to have blown up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, just up the Moscow River from the Kremlin, was a crime. But for Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov to have ordered the cathedral rebuilt in 1995 was closer to an atrocity. These would have to be the thoughts of any informed and cultured observer following the recent completion of structural work on the huge prestige project. Once again the vast bulk of the cathedral, its soon-to-be-gilded central dome reaching 100 metres above the river bank, towers over the nearby Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Construction of the original building, meant to commemorate the Russian dead in the 1812 war against Napoleon, extended over more than four decades before coming to an end in 1883. This time, thousands of workers toiled in three daily shifts to complete the basic structure in just 12 months. On January 7 Luzhkov, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Alexy II slid the final three bricks into the cladding that covers the cathedral's steel-and-concrete walls. Decorative work is to continue until September 1997. "It is truly by God's will that this miracle has been achieved", Patriarch Alexy exclaimed in his sermon. Yeltsin echoed him: "The rebirth of this miraculous cathedral, built by Russian hands, shows that Russia is alive and that the Russian spirit is alive". So much for miracles. Already in the 19th century, better-schooled students of architecture were describing the cathedral as an object of unrepentant ugliness. Unlike many earlier and more pleasing Russian churches, it was never a harmonious outgrowth of the society that created it. Built in the self-consciously archaic style popular in Russia at the time, it reflected the imperviousness to change of a backward-looking state system at war with new impulses, whether cultural or political. Unattractive enough in itself, the cathedral was always monstrously out of proportion with the adjacent, much smaller buildings. Its impact on the broader cityscape is jarring as well. Viewed from across the river, the pleasing succession of forms and dimensions that for centuries led up to the Kremlin with its dazzling gold-and-white churches is again no more. The exterior of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is being reproduced accurately enough, but the part of the building that had artistic merit — the spectacular interior — is gone for good; only an approximate recreation will be possible. Meanwhile, if the point of the rebuilding was spiritual, believers will have to put up with the sense of having something other than the bones of saints beneath their feet. The 1995 model cathedral stands atop an elaborate basement complex that is to include a large underground car park, commercial and ecclesiastical offices and at least four lifts. The typical Muscovite is less exercised by such concerns than by the question: who paid for all this? Luzhkov claims that the cost — put by fundraisers at US$290 million — was raised by public donations and that no city funding was involved. But Moscow's newly rich bankers and commercial tsars, despite their ostentatious personal consumption, do not have such sums to lavish on charity. The assumption is very widespread that the money for the cathedral came from Luzhkov's empire of city-owned enterprises with its tenebrous financing. Or, if banks and commercial firms did make multimillion-dollar donations, they were rewarded by the city authorities with highly profitable concessions. Moscow residents might be happier to shell out for the mayor's "miracle" if their city did not have an estimated 100,000 homeless people; if close to a million Moscow citizens were not still jammed into tenement-style communal apartments; and if the building of new metro lines had not been slowed to a crawl by lack of funds, while outlying micro-regions with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants remain served only by dilapidated buses. The micro-regions, for that matter, also generally lack churches. But that has not dimmed the enthusiasm of the Orthodox Church hierarchy for rebuilding the cathedral. Alexy and his colleagues, it might seem, are less concerned with tending to their flock than with recreating the tsarist-era arrangement under which the Orthodox Church functioned as a virtual ministry of state, its leaders receiving prestige and influence in return for their ideological support. The bond between church and state leaders in Russia has already regained much of its pre-revolutionary strength. Bishops are now almost permanent fixtures at important state occasions, standing close to the politicians and sharing the aura of temporal power. For state leaders of questionable legitimacy — Yeltsin's support ratings are now in the 5-10% range, while Luzhkov gained the Moscow mayoralty by succession, not election — the suggestion of divine right is a welcome boost. While cultivating church hierarchs, Yeltsin and other supposed democrats have seized avidly on political symbols from Russia's absolutist past. The country's coat of arms is now once again the Byzantine double-headed eagle — complete with orb, sceptre and three tsarist-era crowns. The resurrection of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour fits into this pattern with uncanny appropriateness. The huge structure was always meant to overwhelm the landscape and oppress the viewer. In the 19th century, real Russian democrats recorded in their diaries how they could not walk by the vast symbol of triumphant obscurantism without a shudder. Their counterparts a century later are to have the same experience.