Moscow Lido

It was the year 1931 in the Soviet Union. Somewhere in Moscow, there was a beautiful cathedral. The cathedral was built in 1883, and called 'Cathedral of Christ the Saviour'. Well, as strict as communists could be back then, the party line (led by Stalin) didn't quite approve of the symbolism of the Cathedral. Instead, they wanted a big statement about the prosperity of the Soviet state. The idea was pretty simple: it should be a high-rise tower, higher than the empire state building. On top, a huge statue of Lenin was proposed. All in all, the project was supposed to be the tallest building in the world at that time - with such a likely name as 'The Palast of the Soviet'. And where the cathedral was already quite big, this building would simply be huge...



And so they started constructing. For such a big construction, a big foundation was needed. So tons and tons of concrete were poured. After that, the building process was terminated abruptly. The reason still remains unclear. It is said that it could have been because of the outbreak of the second world war, which sounds logical in itself. However, there are quite some people who claim that there was a different reason: the climate in Moscow. Apparently, some clever guy figured out that, with the way Moscow gets foggy, Lenin would be covered in clouds from the waist up for about 280 days a year. Many solutions were invented for this, but all to no avail...

Slowly, the years pass until the year 1958 is reached. It was no more or less official: the project to build the highest building in the world has failed. The central square in Moscow, where once the cathedral stood, now lay deserted with vast concrete foundations - which were starting to rot. Nobody knew exactly what to do with the site...

Until a group of people came up with a idea. The concrete foundations were ideal to be filled with water. So instead making the tallest building, the Soviets decided to make the world's largest outdoor swimming pool - the Moscow Lido. And it was huge. In total, 13.500 square metres of water surface to be exact (which was kept at a constant 27 degrees centigrade). There were about 2000 changing facilities, and as far as statistics like these can be trusted: in an average year (1967), about 2.5 million people visited the pool.

Fast forward to the present. If you go looking for the Moscow Lido, it's nowhere to be found. Instead, you can find a cathedral, called 'Cathedral of Christ the Saviour' on the exact same spot. When the water of the pool started to ruin the paintings of the Pushkin museum across the street (which happened to coincide with the end of the Soviet era), the pool was closed. In a wave of romantic historicism, the cathedral was rebuilt on the site in 1996 - exactly the way it looked around 1900...

More about the Moscow Lido can be read in the following books:

Werner Huber - Hauptstadt Moskau (Zürich 1988)
Fabian Dietrich - Reference book of aquatic buildings, establishment and facilities (München, 1970)