Eliot Borenstein
Editor’s note: On 21 February 2012, Pussy Riot, a feminist rock protest group, staged a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior that was broken up by security forces. The women stated that they were opposing Patriarch Kyril’s support for Vladimir Putin’s reelection as president. In March 2012 three of the group, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were arrested, and on 17 August 2012 their trial ended with a guilty verdict on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” They were given two-year prison sentences. On 10 October 2012 the court suspended the sentence of Yekaterina Samutsevich. The other two women served 21 of 24-month sentences before being amnestied on 23 December 2013 on the eve of the Sochi Olympics.
Scandal Compounded
If one hears the words “Cathedral of Christ the Savior” and “scandal” in the same breath, it is safe to say that Pussy Riot will come to mind. The standard liberal defense of this troup’s anticlerical, anti-Putin performance before the Cathedral’s icon screen is that “Of course, I can’t approve of doing something like that in a church, but their punishment was unjust.” Here is the familiar civil libertarian stance supporting the rights of the outrageous while keeping the perpetrators at a safe, sanitary distance. My argument is the opposite: From start to finish, the venue of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior has been precisely the incarnation of scandal. To many observers, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is not just a site of scandal; it is itself a scandal. Though its architecture is Russian revival, its spirit is purely Gothic, the locus of historical, cultural, and political hauntings that are consistent with Gothic emphasis upon guilt and retribution.
The Scandal of the Cross
It is the Cathedral’s vexed status as sacred space that makes it not just the site of scandal, but scandal itself. Scandal and the sacred have been intimately connected for at least two millennia. As Joel B. Green and Mark D. Baker argue in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, Christianity was born in scandal—to the Romans, the horror of crucifixion was not the physical torment it caused but the sheer humiliation of the procedure and the display: “Death on the cross was associated with such shame that it was not a topic for polite company.”
Synthesizing the National and the Spiritual
In its initial 19th century tsarist conception, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was to be the synthesis of Russia’s national and spiritual destinies—a commemoration of Moscow’s survival in the face of the Napoleonic invasion. Initially a neoclassical project full of Masonic symbolism, the Cathedral was redesigned under Nicholas I in the Russian Revival style. Consecrated in 1883, it would be desecrated in 1930 on Stalin’s orders—first stripped of its gold, and, finally, on 5 December 1931, demolished with dynamite in a public spectacle captured on film.Theatheist regime’s plan was to replace the Cathedral with the Palace of Soviets, a grandiose, Bolshevik Tower of Babel with an enormous statue of Lenin at its peak, like an abandoned groom on top of a Stalinist wedding cake.
From Aborted Palace of Soviets to Swimming Pool
As with the planning for the original Cathedral, the selection of a design for the Palace of Soviets proved tortuous. No fewer than four competitions took place (one all-Union, one international, and two behind closed doors). For a while it appeared that the grand symbol of Soviet supremacy might be designed by a British-born architect living in New Jersey, before Stalin himself put the seal of approval on a homegrown draft. Its construction was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, and its steel frame, like the gold of its predecessor, was commandeered for more pressing military requirements. After over a decade as a barren foundation pit, the site was transformed into an immense inversion of its original design: instead of a tower with one person on top, it became the world’s largest open-air swimming pool, with thousands of people bathing at a given time, a secular parody of the mass baptism of Rus. Then in the late 1990s, the Cathedral was reconstructed, initially intended as a near-exact replica, but eventually revised due to the input of the reliably tacky Zurab Tsereteli. The New Cathedral Merging Church and State--Again The pool was more than a pool, because its very existence reinforced the desecration of the vanished Cathedral. The rebuilt Cathedral on the same site is either the triumph of a resurgent, state-forming Orthodoxy or the site of a scandalous monument in utter disregard of constitutional separation of church and state. The Cathedral has fulfilled its destiny as a symbol of both church and state, sanctifying the state in the eyes of hardliners, and profaning the church in the eyes of skeptics.
More and Less Than a Cathedral
The inclusion of a business center in the Cathedral compound (seen by insiders as separated by a secular firewall, and by outsiders as part of a seamless whole), basement parking, and the discrete charms of a gift shop are particularly jarring within the Eastern Orthodox context. American Protestants and Reform Jews are accustomed to seeing their places of worship as multi-purpose rooms, used for AA meetings, clubs, and other activities when no service is underway, while temple gift shops have been supplying a steady stream of kitschy Judaica to generations of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. The Orthodox Church, however, is traditionally a place of holy mystery. And, most famously, Patriarch Kirill has used the Cathedral as the site of sermons calling on the faithful to vote for Putin (this being one of the primary justifications for Pussy Riot’s selection of Christ the Savior as a performance venue). Add in the complex finances of the Cathedral’s reconstruction (with the direct involvement of former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov), and we clearly have a cathedral that is both more and less than a cathedral.
A Haunted Cathedral
In what way, then, can it be said that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is haunted? Certainly by the ghosts of the past, and more specifically, by the ghosts of architecture either razed or left unbuilt. The donation boxes scattered throughout Moscow in the 1990s were usually accompanied by images of the demolished Cathedral, functioning as both an advertisement for the future and a memorial for a departed loved one.
The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is tantamount to taking an Indian burial ground, building a shopping mall on top of it, and then knocking down the shopping mall in order to replace it with a sparkling new Indian burial ground —with a casino attached to it. From this perspective, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is a doubly haunted house awaiting the arrival of its ghosts. And arrive they did.Liberal critics of the Pussy Riot trio hauled into court were appalled by what they perceived as a medieval, obscurantist witch trial. Both state and church spokesmen repeatedly characterized the women’s song and dance as “satanic” and “diabolical,” a spectacle that could only have been generated by the devil-possessed in need of exorcism. Still those who see the scandal only in terms of the acts of irreverent women may be missing a larger point. The scandal of Pussy Riot in sacred space also publicized the scandal of a cathedral profaned by crass commerce and equally crass church-state politics.
Eliot Borenstein is professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University, New York, New York.