Russia’s Bolshoi Theater reopens after $700 million reconstruction effort

[JI7]

far more worth it than on some arms race .

<Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre is being reopened on Friday evening after a renovation that took six years to complete, and at a cost officially estimated at half a billion pounds.

The frescoes and vast quantities of gold leaf have all been replaced. The material was washed with vodka and polished with squirrel tails.

Symbolically, the curtain has lost its hammer and sickle from the Soviet era, while the old insignia on the building's facade has been replaced with the Russian eagle.

There is a picture of Tsar Alexander II at the theatre after his coronation. Much later, Stalin addressed the Bolshevik faithful at the Bolshi and Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery even attended a performance there in 1947.

It seems unlikely that the Bolsheviks would have approved of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent returning the theatre to its Tsarist glory.

But this is modern Russia, so the greater concern is how much of the money was obtained in a country where corruption is king.>

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15480945

outside
inside

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[MattSh]

2. OK BBC, that doesn't even make sense...

But this is modern Russia, so the greater concern is how much of the money was obtained in a country where corruption is king.

Are you suggesting that some of the money was not obtained??

:crazy:

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Reworded: "...is the fashion in which a great deal of the money was obtained in ..."

not "...is the proportion of the money was obtained in ...".