The Moscow Kremlin and Red Square: Kremin Guide

This excursion is best begun by looking at the sights in Revolution and Manezhnaya squares, then continuing along Okhotny Ryad and Mokhovaya streets as far as Pashkov House (now part of the Lenin State Library of the USSR), and finally returning through the Alexandrovsky Gardens to Revolution Square.
From the iron gate of the main entrance into the Gardens there is a fine view of one of Moscow's central squares called Revolution Square in memory of the bitter fighting that took place here in October 1917. On the right is the former building of the City Duma. Since 1936 it has housed the Central Lenin Museum.

Moskva Hotel

      The museum's rooms contain more than 13,000 exhibits connected with the life of Lenin, his revolutionary activity, his struggle to create the Communist Party and the world's first socialist state, and his founding role in the development of Marxist theory. These exhibits include some true relics. They enable us to get a much clearer idea of the leader and add many a lively detail to his biography.
      On the left-hand side of the square is the Moskva Hotel, one of the first Soviet hotels, built in 1933-5 from a design by the architects Alexei Shchusev, Leonid Sa-velyev and Osvald Stapran. It consists of two sections adjoining each other at right angles. The section with fifteen storeys and a huge portico faces Manezhnaya Square, while the section with ten storeys and two tower-like projections on the corners faces Okhotny Ryad, or Hunters' Row. Along this stretch of the road there used to be taverns, teahouses and many small trading booths which did a brisk trade in poultry, fish and wild game.
      From Manezhnaya Square a thoroughfare bearing the name of the city of Tver recedes into the distance. It first arose in the fourteenth century as the road connecting Moscow with Tver. Hence its name of Tverskaya Street. Later the road went on to Novgorod and the city of St. Petersburg founded by Peter the Great )n 1703 on the Neva. In the old d&ys Tverskaya Street was lined with the palaces and mansions of the nobility. Foreign envoys passed along it to the Kremlin, as did the Russian tsars on their way to be crowned in the Assumption Cathedral. In Soviet times this was one of the first streets in the capital to be widened, straightened and lined with new multi-storey buildings. The most valuable of the old buildings have been preserved and restored, and some even moved back slightly from the street.
      On the right-hand corner of Gorky Street is an administrative building designed by the architect Arkady Langman in 1932-6.
      On the left-hand corner of Tver-skaya Street is National Hotel, built from a design by Alexander Ivanov in 1903 in the eclectic style popular at that time. Among the famous people who have stayed at this hotel are Anatole France, Henri Barbusse, H. G. Wells, Pablo Neruda and Paul Robeson.
      After the Soviet government moved to Moscow Lenin lived and worked here in Room 107 from 11 to 19 March, 1918 with his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and sister Maria Ulyanova. The pale yellow building next to the National Hotel, erected from a design by Ivan Zholtovsky in 1934 is of considerable architectural interest. Its building heralded, as it were, the transition in Soviet architecture to extensive use of classical devices and forms. In this case the architect made use of the forms of the sixteenth-century Italian palazzo. Today the building houses the USSR State Committee for Foreign Travel.
      On the same side of the square is a group of buildings belonging to the Lomonosov Moscow State University with their impressive austere and majestic classical architecture. The main building with a portico and bas-relief together with the side wings forms a large and splendid courtyard facing the square. In the courtyard are statues (1922, sculptor Nikolai An-dreyev) of the writer and polemicist Alexander Herzen (1812-70) and the poet Nikolai Ogaryov (1813-77), both graduates of Moscow University. The so-called "old" building of the university designed by the architect Matvei Kazakov at the end of the eighteenth century, was restored in 1817-19 by Domenico Gilardi in the late classical style after the fire of 1812.