Aaaargh, it lives again. Someone get a mallet and a stake.
The story I was told was that Alekseyev was politically well connected, and had designed the passenger hydrofoils that were a bit of an icon of "advanced Soviet society" in the 1950s and 1960s. The original idea of the Ekranoplan was wake-free fast river transit.... but every time it didn't work, Alekseyev would claim that it would work if you made it bigger, culminating in the CSM.
The Monster was a huge puzzle for the intel community, because they kept trying to figure out the mission that would justify its cost, and there wasn't one.