Red Stars Over Moscow
- By Amos Chapple
Stalin’s red stars still shine above the Kremlin despite calls to revert to an older symbol.
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Five ruby-red stars have glowed atop the Kremlin’s spires since 1937…
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But the Kremlin’s crown once looked very different, with double-headed eagles -- an ancient symbol of empire -- glaring to her east and west.
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Following the Bolshevik revolution, the tsar-tainted eagles were snipped from the Kremlin’s spires and melted down.
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In 1935, four iterations of this star, fronted with a gem-encrusted hammer and sickle, were built to replace the fallen eagles.
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The stars, plated with a total 67 kilograms of gold, were heaved into place with specially-built cranes, but within months the blinged-out emblems began to spoil in Moscow’s freezing, factory-blighted air.
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Locals also complained the oversized stars were out of proportion to the Kremlin’s ancient architecture.
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In 1937, the weather-ravaged stars were removed, with one ending up on top of this riverboat station in Moscow.
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In their place, smaller, hardier stars were hoisted onto the Kremlin’s spires.
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The five new stars (an extra star was added to the Vodovzvodnaya Tower) were built with ruby-colored glass and stuffed with lightbulbs that glowed through Moscow’s long winter nights. The stars were mounted on bearings that allow them to swivel in the wind.
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The red star has long been a symbol of communism, apparently as a result of the 1908 novel Krasnaya Zvezda, “Red Star” (pictured), about a communist society on Mars.
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The Kremlin stars’ five points represent the continents where communism was projected to spread in a global "workers’ revolution" and reportedly also mimics the fingers of a workers’ hands.
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But following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there have been repeated calls to remove the glowing remnants of one of Russia’s darkest eras.
![Russia’s Communists, who still hold seats in the State Duma, are fiercely opposed to the eagles’ return. When a star was covered up for renovation in 2015 (pictured), a debate broke out after which an official announced, “There are no plans whatsoever to replace [the star] with an eagle.” ](https://gdb.rferl.org/782c515d-147c-41c0-a162-e9f1e9628bff_w1024_q10_s.jpg)
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Russia’s Communists, who still hold seats in the State Duma, are fiercely opposed to the eagles’ return. When a star was covered up for renovation in 2015 (pictured), a debate broke out after which an official announced, “There are no plans whatsoever to replace [the star] with an eagle.”
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But members of the Russian Orthodox Church have also weighed into the debate. In 2017, an Orthodox organization called for “the two-headed eagles of the thousand-year-old Russian Empire” to return to the spires of Moscow’s Kremlin.
