The Church of Christ the Saviour is the perfect symbol of what is wrong about modern Russia. In 1931, Stalin dynamited the place to build a monument to Communism. In the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was no more, and the Orthodox Church assumed new powers and reassumed its role as apologist for the state, Boris Yeltsin decided to rebuild the church. Hundreds of millions of roubles later, a garish gold and marble structure was unveiled. It has become a monument to the mix of power, brute force and bling that is the hallmark of the rule of Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin.
Read Full Article »
