Kremlin & Red Square Walking Tour

Overview

Two and a half hours on foot with a guide, covering Red Square end to end, the Kremlin from outside its walls, and the buildings around the square, with the history explained as you walk.

What to expect

• Meeting your guide at the arranged point in the centre.
• Red Square on foot, with St Basil's, GUM and Kazan Cathedral in view.
• The Kremlin walls and towers from outside, with commentary.
• The Mausoleum seen from the square.
• The transition from tsarist to Soviet Moscow explained at the buildings where it happened.

The Kremlin walls are Italian

The red-brick fortification you are looking at was built in the 1480s and 1490s by architects brought from Italy — Pietro Antonio Solari, Marco Ruffo and Aloisio da Milano among them — because Ivan III wanted walls that could withstand artillery and Russian masons had not yet built for gunpowder.

The evidence is on the parapet. The merlons along the top are swallow-tailed, a shape you will find on the Sforza Castle in Milan and on fortresses across Lombardy, and almost nowhere in Russian architecture before this. The most recognisably Russian silhouette in the world has Italian battlements, and it is visible from the square once someone points at it.

A cathedral rebuilt from the drawings of the man who watched it fall

Kazan Cathedral, at the northern corner of the square, was demolished in 1936 to widen the space for parades. Before it came down, the architect and restorer Pyotr Baranovsky measured and drew the building in full detail, on the assumption that it would one day be rebuilt.

He was right, though he did not live to see it finished. The cathedral standing there now was reconstructed between 1990 and 1993 using his survey. It is not a replica assembled from photographs; it is a building put back from the record one person insisted on making while the demolition crews waited.

The stars turn with the wind

Until 1935 the Kremlin towers were topped with double-headed imperial eagles. They were taken down and replaced with stars — the first set gilded and set with gemstones, which tarnished within two years in Moscow's air.

The replacements, installed in 1937, are made of ruby glass and lit from inside so they read as red at night rather than black. Each one is mounted on bearings, so that despite weighing around a tonne they turn to face the wind like weathervanes. On a gusty evening they are quietly rotating above you.

The shop window of a system that did not have shop windows

GUM, along the eastern side of the square, went up in the 1890s as the Upper Trading Rows, and its glass roof — a light steel lattice carrying tens of thousands of panes over three parallel arcades — was engineered by Vladimir Shukhov, the same mind behind the hyperboloid towers now copied worldwide.

After the revolution it was nationalised and spent long stretches as government offices rather than a store. It reopened in 1953 as the flagship department store of the Soviet Union, and was for decades the place where goods appeared that were unavailable anywhere else in the country. The building is worth stepping into for the roof alone.

Practicalities

This is a walking tour and the Kremlin's interior — the grounds, the cathedrals, the Armoury — needs separate tickets and its own visit.

The Mausoleum opens on limited days and closes for maintenance without much notice, and it is seen from the square on this route. Red Square closes entirely for rehearsals and events, in which case the guide reroutes. Dress for standing outdoors; there is no shelter on the square itself.