The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

He noticed that the Russians did not use regular asphalt, which was immune to temperature fluctuations and was the accepted practice back home in Detroit. Instead they preferred a “low-grade concoction,” reinforced with broken bricks from old buildings. Walking through the factory, the American engineer kicked a piece of brick and realized that it had come from a church.21 As part of the atheist campaign, Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior had recently been dynamited to make way for Stalin’s Palace of the Soviets. The demolition was filmed by Soviet newsreel as evidence of the final triumph of the Bolsheviks, with Stalin’s functionary Lazar Kaganovich pictured standing on top of the ruins proclaiming, “Mother Russia is cast down.”22 In retrospect, the destruction of Christianity in Russia was a necessary precursor for all that followed. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, any element of civil society that might provide a countervailing voice to the authority of Joseph Stalin was being systematically destroyed, or turned into an acquiescent imitation of self-parody. The rubble from the Russian churches was salvaged to be used for factory floors, and the church bells removed to a giant smelting works outside Moscow.