Rather than being anything so prosaic, it is the partial realisation of a dream, of the notion that the Soviet Union could become a socialist America, a dream of abundance, of a conception of space which entailed streets criss-crossing above the pedestrian’s head, a conception of the city that meant Manhattan skylines emerging in a matter of months, and a conception of modernism that entailed a vertiginous collision between archaic longings and futurist imaginings. It is a constructivist folly, and as a folly it carries perhaps better than any other structure the vertiginous hopes that state once brought into being.