Red Stars Over Moscow

Five ruby-red stars have glowed atop the Kremlin’s spires since 1937…

 

But the Kremlin’s crown once looked very different, with double-headed eagles -- an ancient symbol of empire -- glaring to her east and west.

Following the Bolshevik revolution, the tsar-tainted eagles were snipped from the Kremlin’s spires and melted down.

In 1935, four iterations of this star, fronted with a gem-encrusted hammer and sickle, were built to replace the fallen eagles.

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.

Locals also complained the oversized stars were out of proportion to the Kremlin’s ancient architecture.
 

In 1937, the weather-ravaged stars were removed, with one ending up on top of this riverboat station in Moscow.

In their place, smaller, hardier stars were hoisted onto the Kremlin’s spires.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.”
 

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.