Although nazi armies came within artillery range of Moscow during world war two, the city escaped the catastrophic damage done in central and eastern Europe, or even in Russian and Ukrainian cities like Leningrad and Stalingrad.   This means that communist architects never had the opportunity to remake the face of Moscow in the way that they rebuilt cities in Germany, Poland and other parts of eastern Europe.   They did demolish some architectural treasures in Moscow and certainly set up a large number of statues of Lenin, Stalin and their ilk, however most of the buildings erected during tsarist times survived and can still be seen today.

    Most people have seen images of communist era statues being torn down and thrown together in empty plots of ground, awaiting their turn to be melted down.   However, there are still some statues from this period scattered around the country, including this one of Marshal Zhukov outside the state history museum at the north end of Red Square.   Zhukov somehow managed to survive the bloody purges Stalin ordered against his own military forces before world war two, and became the leader of the Russian forces in a largely unknown war between Russian and Japan in 1939, and was later appointed to defend Moscow in late 1941 as the Germans closed in on the city.   He was also involved in the battles of Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kursk.

   In this photo, Zhukov's horse looks shocked and embarassed that it's accidentally trodden on and broken someone's favourite heirloom.   In fact, it's one of the Nazi eagles that were a common feature of fascist Germany, a reminder that Zhukov captured Berlin and commanded the Soviet occupation force in Germany after the war.

There's a small orthodox chapel that you can see on the right of this photo, people selling tourist knick-knacks, and street performers with eagles and other circus type attractions.   Through the gate you can see the domes of St Basil's cathedral at the opposite end of Red Square.   It's all a great drawcard both for foreign tourists and local families.

   The cathedral is old, having been built between 1555 and 1561 to commemorate Ivan the Terrible's defeat of the Tatar city of Kazan.   The statue in front of the cathedral dates from 1818 and portrays Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky, who drove Polish invaders out of Moscow in 1612, 200 years before the French under Napoleon came to grief in this same place.   This statue was originally in the middle of Red Square, but the communist government moved it here in 1936 because it was impeding parades.

    Basil himself, after whom the cathedral is named, was one of those barefoot "holy fools" who periodically turn up in Russia, perhaps the most famous being Rasputin.   Basil correctly predicted Ivan's ultimate downfall, but died while Kazan was still under siege.   Somehow the cathedral ended up named for him, rather than for the victor of the battle which is commemorated by the cathedral!

    It seems surprising that the communists allowed so many cathedrals and churches to remain standing.   Apparently Stalin was somewhat superstitious, even ordering a special service in one of the Kremlin cathedrals during the Great Patriotic War in the hope of keeping the encroaching Germans at bay.   His successor Khruschev was apparently more ruthless as far as the church was concerned.

    Both the Epiphany Cathedral and the Church of the Trinity in Nikitniki were undergoing restoration when I visited in August of 2006, and it literally seemed that the same was true for about half of all the historic buildings I saw.   This might be partly a consequence of many decades of neglect and partly a consequence of the severe Moscow climate.

    Stalin decided that he wanted the site for a 315 meter high Palace of the Soviets, with a 100 meter high statue of Lenin outside.   In 1931 Stalin had the cathedral demolished, but the Palace of the Soviets was never built and instead the location was used for the largest swimming pool in the world.

    Come 1995 and Moscow's go-getting mayor Yury Luzhkov started work on a replacement Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, completing it in only two years, but at a cost of US$350 million.   Church building and restoration is certainly a boom industry in Russia, I saw work being done in all the places I visited.   Ordinary Russians seem to have welcomed orthodox beliefs back into their lives, and the orthodox church is once again a major part of Russian national identity.

    One building you'll see near Novospassky Most is the Kotelnicheskaya apartment block, one of Stalin's "Seven Sisters", a group of seven skyscrapers built in the 1950s in an odd mixture of styles which were supposed to impress the world with the splendour of Russia's progress and architectural achievements under communist rule.   Instead the Seven Sisters seem more like a monument to the inferiority complex Russia felt towards America's skyscrapers.

    I'm not too knowledgeable about Russian communists, but I certainly know that the statue isn't of Lenin - looks more like Karl Marx to me.

    After getting his start in the mines of the Ukraine, the man who became Premier Khruschev was assigned to oversee the construction of the subway system, and by all accounts he did a very good job.

    The stations still carry their original names, this photo was taken in the "Proletariat station" and there are other stations named for the 1905 revolution, the barricades set up during the October revolution and Lubyanka, which is where the notorious and dreaded KGB prison was located.

    It's association with nobility made the convent very wealthy, and it ended up owning a huge area of land, a large number of villages and about 14,500 serfs.   With the church acting in this way it's not too surprising that communism was able to take root in Russia by proclaiming the "dictatorship of the proletariat", nor is it surprising that communism was so hostile towards religion.

    There are quite a few interesting buildings within the grounds of the convent, such as the Transfiguration Gate Church which you see here, built between 1687 and 1689.   The church actually sits above the gate which it's named after.

    As you can see there are quite a few tombs within the grounds of the convent, including Sofia and Peter the Great's wife.

    The black and white blocks surrounding Khruschev's bust are symbolic of the mixed feelings Russians have towards him, and of the very public good and bad aspects of his personality.   Like all of Stalin's henchmen he participated and even orchestrated purges of people Stalin perceived to be political enemies, so he certainly had a great deal of blood on his hands.   However, he also showed his very real humanity and compassion throughout this entire period, protecting some people he felt deserved it and showing real empathy to people like Stalin's daughter Svetlana who was treated very coldly by her father, and ended up defecting.

    It was also Khruschev who made the decisive break with Stalin by denouncing his actions and policies in the so-called Secret Speech given at the 20th party congress in 1956, three years after Stalin's death.   This might have been a somewhat pre-emptive and forced action on Khruschev's part, but there's no doubting that he sincerely felt that Stalin's actions while in power were wrong, and it took a lot of courage in the dog-eat-dog world of communist politics to stand up and be counted by flatly contradicting the many years of propaganda that had built up Stalin's personality cult by portraying him as the wise and benevolent father of the country.   This campaign had been so successful that even political prisoners imprisoned in the gulags had broken down weeping when they heard the news of Stalin's death, believing that Stalin's corrupt cronies had been responsible for their imprisonment, rather than Stalin himself.

    It was Khruschev who caused the release of many thousands of political prisoners, however in 1964 his own flaws caught up with him.   The Politburo had grown tired of his erratic policies, his uneducated crudeness and embarassing international buffoonery, most notably the occasion on which he pounded on his desk with his shoe in the United Nations general assembly.   It was a measure of the improved political climate under Khruschev that he was allowed to retire quietly to private life, rather than being lined up against a wall and shot as an enemy of the people on trumped-up evidence.