Eagles and Stars: Reporting from the Heart of Russia

85 years ago, stars appeared instead of the four Kremlin towers on which the two-headed eagles were installed. But what now, when the eagles have returned to the Historical Museum, and the stars have returned to the symbols of the Armed Forces? What is the test of time and how? What seems to have become a habit, but turns out to be passing, and what, probably, is already forever? Report "Vesti on Saturday" from the heart of now all of Russia.

Probably the most comfortable shop in the entire Russian Federation. And what a view from here on the Kremlin towers! The towers on which this Saturday are 85 years old as stars.

But even on the chronicle of the May Day parade of 1935, one can see: Soviet planes are flying over two-headed eagles.

In today's Kremlin we meet with the main expert on its service history, Sergei Devyatov, advisor to the director of the FSO of Russia.

- Sergey Viktorovich, I am not empty-handed to you. Leonardo da Vinci. "Vitruvian Man". Da Vinchin then calculated that the span of the arm is equal to the height. Sorry for the intimate question, how tall are you?

- 170.

- Me too. The length of the star is small from here.

Indeed, the real size of the stars at the top is from 3 to 3.75 meters. But the first stars were even bigger.

“A four-meter span,” says Devyatov.

- Sailability, probably?

- Not only. Sailing - it would not be so scary. And the Kremlin is such an architecturally harmonious object. The stars began to "press" on the towers with their size. As a result, disharmony appeared.

- It looked lurid.

- And almost a year later, the question arose of replacing metal stars with others.

One of those first, very large stars (metal, with a hammer and sickle made of Ural gems) now crowns a completely different tower in Moscow - at the Northern River Station. But in the Moscow Institute of Glass - a memorial made of the same material as now.

Already in the laboratory, they explain to us how difficult it was to select exactly one-color blanks for the drawings of the Kremlin stars.

"Pay attention, there are dots here. These dots are left from sand. It is a very complex technology. And only 20% is the yield of usable glass melts," said Tatiana Pavlushkina, head of the new materials department at the Glass Institute JSC, Ph.D.

And one more requirement was presented to this glass melt, quite understandable: the filament should not be visible.

Lamps of 5 thousand watts were made at a plant in Saransk. Through the ruby glass, the light was smooth, inviting, reliable. But all over the world, giant lamps have recently been changed to more economical ones. We decided to try it in the Kremlin too.

“The task was to preserve the recognizable light of the Kremlin's ruby stars2,” stressed Sergei Devyatov.

And so no one noticed that, unlike Soviet times, now in the Kremlin stars - lamps with a capacity of 50 times less. But the glow is still the same. What else is the secret, as it turned out, of the universal ruby glass?

Why is glass from the Vodovzvodnaya Tower kept in the FSO Museum? More on this later.

"Four-layer glass, colorless glass, milky. Top - selenium ruby", - said Tatiana Pavlushkina.

Where do such contradictions come from? It turns out the four-layer glass was developed in 1975. And what Sergey Devyatov showed us is post-war glass, when the ruby stars were updated for the first time.

"The first glasses were two-layer, there was a distance between them, they were made by the Konstantinovsky plant. This is the Donetsk region. It was a hundred years ago. And then Ivanova's development at the Krasny May plant, Vyshny Volochek," Pavlushkina explained.

Those factories no longer exist, but the recipe has been preserved, and there are enough spare glasses. Moreover, the decision to prevent the stars from breaking because of the WIND, but spinning on bearings, was proposed back in the days with gems. But, as at least this shooting on top shows, over the past decades there have been

- Sometimes these are purely natural problems. Lightning hit the Troitskaya tower, and the glass flowed from the highest temperature. During the events of 1993, a bullet from the White House hit, - recalls Sergei Devyatov.

- I have heard that during the war, due to the work of anti-aircraft artillery, there was damage. But it turns out that even in 1993.

- Yes. During the war, there was still a problem - the Kremlin was bombed eight times. And here more than a dozen bombs exploded, including powerful ones. Damage again to the Trinity Tower, when a half-ton bomb hit the corner of the Arsenal.

When the Red Army went on the offensive, the Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower with the star appeared on the highest military leader's order "Victory" of the Great Patriotic War. But, by the way, is this symbol, the star, only Soviet?

- I wanted to return to Leonardo da Vinci, because it is believed that this is a symbol of the star. And, in fact, if we look, here it is, the star of the human figure. The symbol is very ancient. The Slavs come across as early as the 10th century. In tsarist Russia, as it turned out, a star was placed on railway carriages and steam locomotives, and in the middle there was a two-headed eagle, like the current Hero of Labor star in new Russia. That is, let the stars remain?

- We must understand that in our Kremlin, as a visual object, as a picture, the Kremlin's appearance already exists in the minds of people of many generations. It is known that there is a "hundred-ruble plan", the "Intervision" screensaver, - said Sergei Devyatov. - All this went strictly with this picture.

Only after all, the letters "USSR" on the facade of the Grand Kremlin Palace have since been replaced with the same two-headed eagles, as they were originally.

Stalin, for example, was annoyed that his falcons were flying over the eagles of the Historical Museum. And then the eagles were removed from him. But today, as everyone can see during the parades, it was restored. And what about the Kremlin? So, what is the historical canon?

- But what was on these small turrets before the revolution? Weathervane?

- Weathervane. And the four towers, unlike today, now the five towers have stars. If we take 1917, then there were four eagles, - explained Devyatov.

- Spasskaya, Nikolskaya.

- Troitskaya and Borovitskaya.

- Was there a Vodovzvodnaya?

- Weathervane.

That is, Vodovzvodnaya is already outside the brackets: if you remove the star from it, then you will definitely not change to an eagle. In addition, no matter how you relate to the legacy of the Bolsheviks, the Kremlin was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List with the stars on the towers. After all, today they are a reminder.

- By a mystical coincidence, on the week of the 85th anniversary of the Kremlin stars, the Tarusa City Council voted 6: 1 to abandon Soviet names in the city center. And here's an interesting thing: with regard to the Kremlin, these conversations are over. Why is that?

- The ideological content is gone, but the artistic perception as the image of the Kremlin, as part of the image of the Kremlin walls, towers remains. It has remained forever, - said Sergei Devyatov.

- And (with all due respect to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg) no one needs to explain what the stars are, everyone understands.

Technology, heritage is truly unique. And the history should, at least, know.