The Walls of Kitai-Gorod

The remaining stretch of wall, on Moscow's historic Varvarka Street.

One of the Zaryadye district’s most significant remaining landmarks is a long stretch of red brick wall that stretches down Varvarka Street. Unassuming at first glance, it is actually one of the only remaining pieces of the perimeter wall that encircled Moscow’s central Kitai-Gorod area.

The wall in the early 1900s, bordering Varvarka Street.

 The wall was constructed in the 1530s as a defensive barrier, and helped to define the innermost “ring” of Moscow’s concentric layout [1].  As the city grew, its growing population created increasing traffic congestion within the central district. Soviet officials saw the wall as a “relic of savage and medieval times,” and demolished it in the 1930s to relieve these issues. This illustrates a recurring conflict in Moscow’s history between modernization projects and historical sites. The latter are frequently blamed for constricting the city’s infrastructure, and are torn down after their original purposes are no longer relevant.

The beginning of Varvarka Street in 2010, with the wall removed.

Kupriyanov’s and Sadovnikova’s research helps illuminate this process. After conducting interviews with Muscovites who had inhabited Zaryadye prior to its demolition, they concluded that the district had become a primarily residential area that “did not possess any specific memorial status in the minds of the locals” [5]. Historic buildings such as the wall were seen as everyday objects, as recounted by one local’s testimony: “People would climb out of their windows and we would do the same, we would play on this Kitaigorod Wall. There were loads of pigeons there and… so… we would fry eggs there, you name it, we did it there—you know, we were kids back then!” [2]. As this anecdote shows, Moscow’s historic landmarks have often been dismissed as mundane elements of the city’s everyday landscape, making it all too easy to advocate for their removal.