Moscow's Shukhov radio tower is coming down this fall and going back up in new steel by 2028. The people in charge call it a restoration. I call it a replacement: when nearly all the original metal is swapped out, what goes back in place is a replica of the 1922 tower. And what weighs most is that the legal protection on the original steel was simplified along the way.
What is happening in Moscow
The tower was built between 1919 and 1922 by Vladimir Shukhov, in the middle of the Civil War. The design called for 350 meters and nine sections, tall enough to beat the Eiffel Tower. Steel ran short, and it came out with six sections and 144 meters, according to Meduza.
Opened in 1922 as the Comintern Radio Tower, it was the Soviet Union's first major radio transmitter. In 1937 it sent out the first television signal, and on March 10, 1939, regular TV broadcasting began. It has been off the air since 2002.
The owner is RTRS, the Russian state radio and television broadcasting network. In April 2026, Russia's state design review body approved the reconstruction plan, according to Kommersant. The report records more than 80% of the surface as corroded and finds that most of the connections between the lattice and the transition rings are unreliable, with a high chance of sudden failure. Per Meduza, 31 of about 30 thousand rivets were missing in 2014, and now 55 are.
RTRS plans to replace almost all of the original steel. Meduza says only a few supports on the sixth section, at the top, may be kept. Stanislav Belyavsky, RTRS deputy director general, says whatever can be restored will be restored, whatever can't will be swapped for modern-material equivalents, and that "it will be exactly the same tower."
The rule that changed
The detail that matters is in the legal protection. In 2014, the heritage listing described the tower's steel in detail: bars, rings, rivets, joints. In a revision dated July 8, 2022, the list was cut down to just "metal" as the protected material, which, according to Meduza, cleared the way for a replica reconstruction.
In other words, the list that protected the steel piece by piece was simplified in 2022, four years before the replacement plan was approved.
Who disagrees
The engineer's great-grandson, also named Vladimir Shukhov, says a conservative restoration would take up to 20 years. RTRS wants to finish in two. The Union of Restorers called for an independent review on August 6, and more than 10 thousand people signed the petition from the architecture site Arkhi.ru.
Other towers by the same designer were handled differently, per Meduza. Shukhov's first hyperboloid tower, in Nizhny Novgorod, went back up in 2026 with just one bent element replaced. The transmission line tower near Dzerzhinsk, restored in 2020, had its missing elements put back. The one at the Vyksa steelworks, moved and restored in 2025, got laser cladding to rebuild lost metal instead of swapping whole pieces. In every case, the limit was replacing 5% of the metal at most.
The other side has an honest argument: with more than 80% of the surface corroded and connections at risk of failing, leaving it as is isn't an option either. Nobody wants the tower to fall. But the question the plan doesn't answer is why this time they can't do what was done on the others.
How the tower got here
Two past decisions help explain its condition.
In 1971, an intervention by specialists wrapped the base in concrete. Shukhov had designed the supports to move with the wind, and the concrete locked that play. According to Meduza, rust began forming right where the metal meets the foundation.
In 2011, the Russian government released 135 million rubles for restoration, but the real bill was 350 million. A good part of the money went back to the treasury and the work was postponed. In 2015, the antennas were removed to cut weight, and in 2016 internal metal supports were installed, which, per Meduza, upset the structure's natural balance.
The lesson for anyone who runs a transmitter is the oldest one in the trade. Deferred maintenance becomes a major job, and a well-meant fix without measurements before and after can make worse what it meant to repair. A 104-year-old tower survived war, wind and decades of delay. What will be left of it after 2028 is the question still hanging.