When the detonation of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow brought down its onion cupolas into a cloud of dust and dirt, it took a year for the Bolsheviks to remove all the debris. Once that was finally done, a steel frame sprang from the cleared soil. It was intended for the Palace of the Soviets, a concrete wedding cake-like structure planned to be the tallest building in the world at 1,365 feet, crowned with a 300-foot statue of a saluting Lenin.
