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monstrodamus: "The funny thing is where they wanted to build the Lenin building, they first built a pool and now built a huge church. Big shame in my opinion."Actually, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was built there in the 19th century, and destroyed (blew up) in 1931 in order to make place for the Palace of Soviets. The Palace of Soviets was not built, so they'd built a pool instead, and later "rebuilt" the Cathedral in the 1990s.The original Cathedral was a true masterpiece: it took 45 years to build it, the church was decorated with marvelous pieces of art, and ultra-rich decorations. For instance, it took 422 kg of gold to build the iconostasis (see Wikipedia for a definition). The Stalin's decision to blow it up was compared to (hypothetical) demolishing of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, or Notre Dame in Paris.If you ask me, it was a big shame to blow the cathedral in the first place.Some info can be found here:<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour_%28Moscow%29&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour_%28Moscow%29&lt;/a&gt;My primary source of information is the book "Imperium" by Ryszard Kapuscinski,available at Amazon, for example. There is a few pages long description of the original cathedraland further history of the plot in the chapter "The Temple and the Palace", starting at p. 95of the English edition (you can read it online @ Amazon if you are their client).

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Ever been to Rio?

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Rome plus + utopia = moscow

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Soviets built interesting building in their influence zone. Here's an existing example: <a class="user" href="http://sefir.net/palac/&quot;&gt;http://sefir.net/palac/&lt;/a&gt;

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Fantastic drawings!

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Moscow State University in person is a pretty awesome site, definitely rivaling some of these drawings.<a class="user" href="http://www.msu.ru/tour/images/mnn_2.jpg&quot;&gt;http://www.msu.ru/tour/images/mnn_2.jpg&lt;/a&gt;

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