Stalin The Maniac

привет, my friend!

On Saturday (before NYC) I went on a tour called Stalin's Moscow, which focused on the kind of architecture Stalin wanted to implement in Moscow and also got to talk about the purges.

So... Moscow was supposed the laboratory where the commies would build the perfect socialist city, and then spread such a joy to the world. Stalin had all main avenues widened, so foreigners would come and be amazed with such a magnificient city. That's why avenues are so wide now (I'll post pictures of avenues at a later date).

This is a building from 1912 that was moved on wheels about 30 meters on Tverskaya (the main drag of Moscow).

We then visited the House of the Embankment, which was built in 1931 as a model of future constructions in the socialist world. It is a huge building that was designed as a self-contained city, including day care, supermarket, theater, and a communal take-out kitchen (socialists would be too busy too cook at home). There were 505 apartments and 24 entrances!

The building is located some 100 meters from the Kremlin and was inhabited by many state officials at the time. It turned out that many of them ended up being killed by Stalin. Here's a memorial plaque in honor of 700 people who lived in the building and were shot under Stalin's orders:

It is estimated that over 25 million people got arrested and 3.8 million killed under Stalin's orders, 1.6 million killed just in 1937 (the bloodiest of all years).

пока!