EUROPE : 11th-Hour Rush to 50th Anniversary : With Russia’s World War II ceremony only a few weeks away, workers race to finish a garish memorial. Squabbling had stalled the project.

Clouds of dust, bursts of flame and the roar of machinery waft menacingly from Poklonnaya Hill, the western highland where Napoleon waited to capture Moscow 183 years ago.

The commotion this time is an army of construction workers racing furiously against the clock to finish a garish tribute to the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II in time to host 55 heads of state at a lavish May 9 celebration.

As if the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s proudest moment had sneaked up from nowhere, Moscow city officials are embarked on the crash construction program of the century.

The mile-long memorial complex at Poklonnaya, first proposed 21 years ago, must be ready for 15,000 dignitaries expected at a Victory Day military parade that has been banished from Red Square in a bow to Western sensitivities about Russia’s continuing war in Chechnya.

Hundreds of thousands of war veterans and ordinary Muscovites are also expected to crowd onto the vast park’s stone walkways, terraces and fountains. That is, if the grounds are ready by then.

The soaring 468-foot obelisk that is the center of the monument park was crowned with its 30-ton bronze Goddess of Victory only this week, and two equally hefty cherubs still waited at the foot of a crane to join her.

Scaffolding enfolds much of a Russian Orthodox church to be sanctified on the grounds before the end of the month and open to the masses of visitors on Victory Day. Hundreds of welders, plasterers, roofers and gilders have been swarming day and night around the construction that appears far more than three weeks from completion.

Inside an arc-shaped memorial museum that houses six panoramas depicting the Red Army’s role in the war, battle painter Veniamin M. Sibirsky was putting the finishing touches on his mural “The Storming of Berlin.”

“I hope to be done within a week or else to fall down and die on the spot,” said the 59-year-old artist, fatigued by the seven-day-a-week schedule he has had for months. “All the racket is getting to me.”

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A project that has moved in fits and starts, Poklonnaya has become an allegory for the inefficiency of the old Soviet system as well as for the political sparring that troubles the new reform age.

Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, a rival of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s, has paid several visits recently to the site where 3,000 laborers now work round the clock.

He complained last week during one inspection that the Russian government had not paid the city for construction expenses since January.

“It will be done on time. Everything will be done on time! It will actually be done ahead of time, by April 30,” insisted the project’s Georgian architect, Zurab K. Tsereteli, looking for all the world like a man who hoped that wishing would make it so.

“We have to allow for cleanup,” he said, taking in with the sweep of his hand the 62-acre site littered with construction debris and pocked with excavations.

The last-minute dash to meet deadline is a longstanding Russian tradition. Few Soviet-era projects were ever completed without an eleventh-hour cry of Avral!-- all hands on deck--and Poklonnaya, despite being in the works for two decades, has been no exception.

But the project has also fallen victim to the tempest of recent history, with successive leaders scrapping and restarting the project in recurring battles over its scope and design.

Serious work on the site began only three years ago, when Luzhkov assumed responsibility for the venue that was to host Moscow’s most luminous international gathering since the coronation of the last czar in 1896.

“They’re on us all the time, telling us we have to move faster,” Pyotr P. Grin, an adviser to Tsereteli from the Russian Academy of Art, complained of nagging city officials.

“The organizers need time to work out security plans, and to do that they need an exact layout of the grounds to work with, and we cannot provide that yet,” Grin said.

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Indeed, one Western diplomat sent last week to inspect what facilities have been completed said security was not the only issue terrifying the presidential advance teams.

“We asked to see the facilities and they could only show us one toilet,” the nonplussed diplomat said. “Can you imagine, 55 heads of state with their entourages, and one toilet!”