Archive Architecture Faith Books Moscow Heritage

5 December 1931

5 December 1931. The writer Korney Chukovsky recorded in his diary:

"A sunny, frosty day, with silver smoke and a blue sky. Tram No. 10 took me not to the Stone Bridge but to the Zamoskvoretsky one, since they are blowing up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour nearby. A cannon fired, three times, and five minutes later, not before, a grey-blue plume of smoke rose, beautiful in the sun.
A peasant woman stands watching and weeping. I approached along the other bank of the Moskva River, and when I had almost reached the Stone Bridge, it was no go: a patrol.
'Where do you think you're going? Can't you see they're breaking up a church?'
'I'm going back.'"

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Pope Leo XIV on the courage to do good, to forgive and to enter into dialogue

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Old colour photograph with cracks: adults and children resting on the grass on a slope under a tree.

Orientalist Grigory Kozakov with relatives and children at a picnic near the village of Zhikharevka in 1903

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Konstantin Ivanov's Cosmonautics Day poster, published in Moscow in 1977

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An American archaeologist has carried out a forensic analysis of skulls of people who were buried beside the tombs of Egypt's first kings at Abydos, and has found on many of them traces of violent death. Abydos in Upper Egypt served as the burial place of the kings

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Pope Leo XIV on the courage to do good, to forgive and to enter into dialogue

Orientalist Grigory Kozakov with relatives and children at a picnic near the village of Zhikharevka in 1903

Konstantin Ivanov's Cosmonautics Day poster, published in Moscow in 1977

Signs of violent death found on skulls from burials beside the royal tombs at Abydos