On December 5, 1931, by the personal order of the Ossetian Georgian and Marxist revolutionary Dzuhaev, known also as "Koba", "Soselo", "Salin", and "Stalin", the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the main shrine of Moscow, was blown up. This cathedral, central to the Russian Orthodox Church, was built in honor of the courage of the Russian people in the struggle against Napoleon's invasion of 1812. Its solemn consecration took place on May 26, 1883, on the feast of the Ascension of the Lord.

In 1931, a commission was created to identify valuables in the cathedral. After a month of work, a list of monuments to be preserved was compiled. Small fragments of wall paintings, some church utensils, and several bas-reliefs were recognized as artistically valuable and transferred to museums, while the rest was destroyed.

In August 1931, a fence was erected around the cathedral, and in the fall, active dismantling of the building began. The work was done hastily: sheets of roofing and dome cladding were thrown down, damaging the facing and sculptures. The cross from the cathedral's dome, thrown down, got stuck in the rebar. When it became clear that it would not be possible to completely dismantle the building, it was decided to blow it up.

The first explosion did not destroy the cathedral, so additional charges were laid, and on December 5, 1931, at noon, the cathedral was destroyed.

Marble from the cathedral was used to decorate the "Kropotkinskaya" and "Okhotny Ryad" metro stations, and benches adorned the "Novokuznetskaya" station. Some slabs with the names of the heroes of the 1812 war were crushed and used for paving paths in Moscow parks, while another part was used for the decoration of city buildings.