RUSSIA: Mighty Monument

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On a bank of the placid Moskva, close to the Kremlin, a prodigious peacetime project was resumed. The project: the erection of the world's mightiest monument, the Palace of the Soviets, dedicated to Soviet Russia's founding father, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Eleven years ago the Russians first conceived the idea of surmounting a soaring edifice of pillared concrete with a 328-ft. statue of Lenin in stainless steel (see cut). The crown of his bald pate was to tower 1,364 ft. above the nearby tomb in which his embalmed body lay. (New York's Empire State building would reach only to the statue's midriff.)

By 1939 a massive steel skeleton had sprouted skyward, but war came and the steel was melted down into guns and shells. Last week, with the Germans well whipped, the Russians began building their palace in earnest.