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St Basil's Cathedral
Welcome to Disneyland ... St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow. Photograph: Cpl Russ Nolan Rlc/PA
Welcome to Disneyland ... St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow. Photograph: Cpl Russ Nolan Rlc/PA

St Basil's Cathedral: Russia's faulty towers?

This article is more than 12 years old
As the Red Square icon turns 450, let's join the Google doodle and celebrate the crazy architecture of this comical creation

Happy 450th birthday to Russia's national symbol, St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square – and it's a good time to step back and consider what a fantastically, psychedelically bizarre symbol it is. That's not a cathedral, it's a fairytale palace made of sweets! It's a stage set for The Nutcracker!

It was particularly hilarious during the cold war. There was Khrushchev or Brezhnev gazing on sternly from a Kremlin balcony at the synchronised marching and Soviet military hardware scrolling past below, but the whole deadly solemn communist pomp was undercut by that garish chunk of Disneyland architecture sitting in the corner, screaming "yoo hoo!". St Basil's was like a clown's nose on the face of the evil empire.

No wonder Stalin wanted to destroy it. He succeeded with other Moscow churches, such as the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was rebuilt in 1990, but his order to demolish St Basil's was fortunately thwarted by a conservation architect named Pyotr Baranovsky. According to the legend, Baranovsky sent Stalin a telegram saying he would rather kill himself. He got five years in the gulag for his troubles. St Basil's also offended Napoleon's architectural sensibilities a century earlier. Having stabled his horses in it, he then tried to dynamite it on his way out of Russia, but rain put out the fuses.

Was it St Basil's symbolic power that led to its persecution, or simply its comedy aesthetics? Even without the garish candy colour scheme (it was originally white), it's an odd-looking pile-up of onion domes, polygonal towers, blank arches and sharp spires and extremes of architectural vocabulary. Little is known about its architect, Postnik Yakovlev. Perhaps he was a children's entertainer whom Ivan the Terrible enlisted in a rare moment of levity. Ivan's predecessor, Ivan III, had imported an Italian Renaissance architect, Aristotele Fioravanti, to design his Cathedral of the Dormition at the Kremlin (not that it really shows), but historians have scrabbled around to find a precedent for St Basil's.

Despite appearances, St Basil's is actually pretty orderly, especially if you look at it on plan. It is one central church surrounded by a symmetrical star of eight chapels, four major and four minor, aligned to the points of the compass. What ruins the order is the irregular shape of the central church, and the addition of a ninth chapel, built for St Basil himself – a holy fool who apparently wore no clothes and championed the poor. Ivan the Terrible allegedly carried his coffin.

It is a religious building, after all. It is said to have been inspired by Jerusalem, both the abstract and the literal. Perhaps it was a sort of optical illusion of "the kingdom of heaven", the post-apocalypse New Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation as well as an approximation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, according to travellers' accounts. Either that, or someone put something in the architect's unleavened bread.

The Christian significance is all but lost today. St Basil's is now a building that belongs inside snow globes, on T-shirts, commemorative plates, and in Hollywood spy movies as a quick signifier of "Moscow". Perhaps its garishness fits better with today's oligarch-stuffed, ostentatious Russia than it has done with previous eras. Could it have influenced the likes of Gaudi, or even Gehry? Whichever way you look at it, take a good look at it: St Basil's is the craziest national monument around.

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