On October 5, 1931, Moscow residents heard two powerful explosions that shook the gloomy city. It was the beginning of the 1930s, a time of great terror, when millions more innocents were about to fall victim to a new regime, and no one probably wanted to ask what was going on. When the smoke disappeared, however, everything was crystal clear: the Soviets had blown up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, one of the prides of the Romanov Empire [Fig. 20]. This was no surprise; anti-clericalism was built into the DNA of the Bolshevik Soviet Union. But the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was intended to demonstrate something else: the USSR wanted to distance itself from the tsarist imperialist policies that the cathedral embodied. A year earlier, the same fate had befallen the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Tbilisi. The new regime had begun to rewrite history by dynamite and by stone. But had change really come?

Utopia in Power and the End of an Empire?

After the so-called October Socialist Revolution in 1917, all the subtle (and sometimes overt) signs pointed to this rewriting of history. The rhetoric of tsarist Russia's successor, the Soviet Union, changed dramatically. The new socialist state certainly did not want to build on its imperialist past and swiftly ended the First World War by drawing on the rhetoric of the spirit of Marxist doctrine to rewrite the historical motivation for going to war, which was now revised as a clash between bourgeoisie interests and those of the innocent and exploited proletarians. At the official level, therefore, imperialism was considered an instrument of the exploitation of the working class and was strictly rejected. It would, of course, be interesting to reflect on whether this was in fact the case, and to what extent Lenin's version of the doctrine of “world revolution,” which was so popular in the early years of the emerging USSR, was really opposed to the previous tsarist imperialism. But that is a subject too broad to address here. However, the idea of systematically rejecting imperialism on a rhetorical level, even at times when the USSR had long since emerged as an empire, was maintained. This is exampled in the texts of the art historian Mikhail Babenchikov (1890–1957).