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Apr 16Liked by Stephan Sander-Faes

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour—

Is that the one built by the Soviet/Russian military, attached to a military theme park?

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I don't think so; it's the one that was demolished in the 1930s (to make way for the "Palace of the Soviets"), replaced eventually by a swimming pool, and rebuilt in the 1990s. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was crowd-funded, so to speak, at a time when ordinary Russians could have funded "other" things.

I think you might mean this place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces

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Apr 17Liked by Stephan Sander-Faes

Yep! That’s it.

I remember seeing a picture of that huge swimming pool.

Crowd-funded, as in “it’s been suggested that you should donate to this”…?

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I don't know about this, but I think that the Russian gov't was quite…ineffective during the 1990s, but I shall ask my Russian colleague later this week.

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I just wondered if the crowd funding was coercive. You just meant that the people did it because the government couldn’t? Okay. I can see that.

An amazing effort all the same

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