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KALYAYEV SQUARE
Before the Revolution it was called Senate Square after the nearby building of the former Senate. During the early years of Soviet power it was renamed in memory of the revolutionary Ivan Kalyayev (1877-1905).
Council of Ministers of the USSR (former Senate)
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This is the youngest of the Kremlin squares. It took shape in the second half of the eighteenth century, when a new age and new aesthetic outlook left its mark on the architecture of the Kremlin. The narrow, crooked alleys which had grown up higgledy-piggledy in the old days now disappeared. The hallmark of classicism, the new style which now predominated in Russian architecture, was harmony.
The ensemble of Senate Square was formed in accordance with these canons. As its name suggests, the focal point here was the Senate building erected at the end of the eighteenth century by the eminent Russian architect Matvei Kaza-kov. With his fine sense of planning, he suggested laying out a new triangular square in front of the Senate.
This square was bordered by the facades of the Arsenal, the Senate and the Armoury (the old building erected in 1806-12 by the prominent architect Ivan Yegotov).
After a new building for the Armoury had been erected by the Pine-Grove Gate in 1851, the old one was rebuilt as a barracks and demolished a century later. The Kremlin Palace of Congresses now stands on this spot.
Thus the facades of the buildings facing Kalyayev Square represent three centuries: the seventeenth (the Church of the Twelve Apostles), the eighteenth (the former Arsenal and Senate) and the twentieth (the Palace of Congresses).
One of the facades of the Palace of Congresses (that facing the Trinity Tower) stands on Communist Street in the Kremlin. On the left-hand side of this street is a small three-storey building, on the first floor of which Vladimir Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya lived in two small rooms during March and April of 1918, while their apartment in the former Senate building was being put in order. In March 1958 a memorial plaque with a bas-relief of Lenin and the inscription "Vladimir llyich Lenin lived and worked in this house in March-April 1918" was unveiled on the building.
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