Since the early days of the Soviet Union, the Shukhov Radio Tower in Moscow has been a symbol of Russia’s soaring ambitions and capacity for dizzying feats of engineering and derring-do.
This week, contractors sent by the Kremlin were set to arrive on the quiet street south of the city center where the tower stands to start dismantling this landmark of 20th-century architecture, which is named after Vladimir Shukhov, its creator. Its owners say that the corroding steel-lattice structure is beyond repair and that proposals for alternatives to demolition are unaffordable.
But the plan to dismantle the tower, which was completed in 1922, has galvanized a movement to protect it. In a rare display of public pushback in wartime Russia, the country’s architects, engineers and preservationists signed an open petition urging the government to reconsider. They have organized a festival dedicated to the tower and to Mr. Shukhov’s other works, along with free walking tours to raise awareness of the value of his legacy.
Airat Bagautdinov, an architectural historian and a leader of the preservation campaign, said the state’s decision had been driven primarily by cost.
“Nobody knows in advance which specific elements can be preserved and which cannot,” Mr. Bagautdinov said in an interview. “A decision was made simply not to bother. If you get involved in restoring a tower that no one has ever restored, whose condition no one knows, risks arise that the estimate might be exceeded five or 10 times.”
The planned demolition of one of the technological marvels of Modernist Russia, neglected by the authorities for years, showcases how, over the decades, the Kremlin’s priorities have strayed far from the preservation of the country’s architectural heritage. Next year, Russia plans to spend more than $200 billion on defense, much of it going to the war effort in Ukraine, while allocations for culture and social projects will shrink.
The public uproar over the tower’s fate echoes protests against some of President Trump’s plans to remake the American capital. The president is pushing to redo the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, including by finding a way to put his name on it. He is also trying to revamp Washington’s historic public golf course, and build a gilded ballroom after demolishing the East Wing of the White House.
The Russian tower, standing 148 meters (485 feet), was commissioned by Lenin. It was created to spread the word of Communism across the vast Soviet territory through what was then the new medium of radio technology. But the steel radio tower was always more than a utilitarian transmitter.
One of the first major works of construction after the Russian Revolution, it was designed to be an object of gossamer beauty and optimism, a beacon of progress, embodying the world-scale ambitions of the young Communist state. Some have compared it to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Then, decades of neglect and poor maintenance gradually corroded the steel. The last time it was repainted was in 1964. The tower was largely decommissioned in late 2001. By 2014, it was scheduled to be knocked down.
The wrecking balls were called off after protests and news stories in and out of Russia earned the tower a reprieve. In 2017, a new plan earmarked the use of a helicopter to dismantle the tower’s top sections and restore them in a workshop. The four bottom sections were to be restored on site. That never happened.
Now, the Russian Ministry of Culture has cleared the path for a complete dismantling, downgrading the preservation status of the tower, whose hyperboloid shapes resemble a skyscraper-high telescope or Christmas tree. The original steel and rivets from which the tower was built are no longer considered protected. The tower’s owner, the Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Network, has said it would try to salvage bits and pieces and reuse them to erect a new tower in the vein of the original.
But it is not clear what this means, and no renderings or details have been made public.
Speaking at a news conference in Moscow last week, executives from the state Broadcasting Network said the only way forward was to demolish the tower and recreate some new version of it.
Preservationists’ ideas to restore the tower are too expensive, officials have said. Aleksei Y. Popov, deputy head of the Broadcasting Network, said that “all those projects came out not to hundreds of millions,” but “billions of rubles.”
Vladimir I. Traush, a structural engineer who served as a scientific consultant on the project, argued that the priority should be honoring the design rather than the physical metal.
“His brilliant idea was that he invented the structure,” Mr. Traush said of Mr. Shukhov. “Our task is to preserve his concept and pass this idea on to future generations. Nothing lasts forever. Even the sun will burn out someday, let alone any man-made structures.”
Regardless of the cost, preservationists argue, losing an authentic landmark carries a price far beyond money. And they counter that a recreating the tower with modern materials would erase the monument’s historical integrity.
“Its irreplaceable value lies in the authentic structure itself,” international signatories said in a last-minute appeal to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, who in 2009 promised to preserve the monument.
Those petitioners include prominent international architects, structural engineers and historians, who added: “A facsimile in modern materials, however careful, is a false replica, and the tower’s validity and historical significance would be lost forever. Nor is replacement necessary: Recent surveys report that the original steel has a very good long-term life expectancy.”
Richard Pare, a British architectural photographer and an expert on Soviet Modernism, said that building a replica would be “a catastrophic loss of one of the finest and supremely elegant masterworks of 20th-century engineering.”
Mr. Pare recalled the sensation of documenting the tower from inside its security perimeter while photographing it in the early 1990s for a book.
“At the time appointed and escorted by armed security guards,” he said, “I was allowed to pass through the surrounding exclusionary walls. By chance it was an overcast day, and I was concerned about how to work in that flat, undifferentiated light. As it was, it turned out to be the perfect situation to demonstrate the sheer loveliness of the upward-rushing forms.”
Those qualities, Mr. Pare emphasized, cannot be reproduced by a facsimile.
Barry Bergdoll, an architectural historian at Columbia University, said, “It is hard to believe that Putin’s Russia, capable of bombing Ukraine relentlessly, is not capable of restoring one of the key architecture and engineering accomplishments of 20th-century Russia.”
The Shukhov Tower was Communism’s response to capitalism’s Eiffel Tower, Mr. Bergdoll added, noting that France’s monument “has been restored on numerous occasions” without wholesale replacement of its original parts.
“Why would anyone prefer a reproduction?” Mr. Bergdoll asked. “And who believes they will actually rebuild it?”
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