"A ceremony on Moscow's Red Square today celebrated the restoration of two huge icons that graced two of the Kremlin's gateways for half a millennium before vanishing during the first decades of the atheist Soviet state.

"The icons of Christ and St. Nicholas, key symbols of Russia's national and spiritual history, were apparently saved from destruction by a singular act of insubordination on the part of one or more Soviet-era workers. They were rediscovered in May and since restored to their original glory.  [...]

"Elena Gagarina, director of the Kremlin Museums (and daughter of the first man in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin), believes that the icons were removed under Stalin's orders in 1934, when the central state restoration workshops were closed down and their director arrested. 'We have no information about [the icons] after that,' she says, but with political purges gaining steam and the Great Terror on the horizon, there is strong circumstantial evidence that it was considered high time to purge the Kremlin walls of religious icons.

"But with a crafty -- and perhaps typically Russian -- anti-authoritarian ingenuity, the professional restorers intentionally subverted their presumed instructions to remove the icons from sight, outwitting the Soviet state at immense personal risk to themselves and their families.

"'We now see that the icons were not covered by accident, because they weren't just plastered over,' Gagarina told AOL News. 'First they were covered by a metal grating and the plaster was laid over that and the surface was then painted red. In other words, they were covered so that they could eventually be recovered.'

"Under the czars, the Savior icon was considered so holy that those passing beneath it were obliged to dismount and bare their heads.

"Instead of destroying the icons, the workers literally removed them from sight, leaving a small space to protect the painted surface before covering them with a new layer of wall, hiding them for an unguessable future."

Image source, text source.