Red Square

The eastern side of the Kremlin, shielded by neither the Moskva nor the Neglinnaya, was reckoned its most vulnerable, and the Italian architects on the fortifications convinced Ivan III to clear the ground outside the walls as a field for shooting: decrees of 1493 and 1495 ordered every building within 234 metres pulled down. From 1508 Aloisio the New dug the Alevizov moat along the wall, 541 metres long and limestone-lined.

The ground was called Torg, the market, and for a time Troitskaya after the Trinity church burned in the 1571 Tatar invasion. It was also called Pozhar, usually glossed 'burnt-out place', though a chronicle of 1534 uses the word for vacant trading ground, with no connection to fire. The name Krasnaya, archaically 'beautiful' rather than 'red', first appears in a document of 23 April 1661, behind which a lost decree of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich is suspected.

After a fire in 1547 Ivan the Terrible reorganised the wooden shops along the eastern side into market lines, rebuilt in stone after the fire of 1595. Lobnoye Mesto, the platform for proclaiming tsars' edicts, is first mentioned in 1549, when Ivan IV, then nineteen, spoke from it.

Ivan IV ordered the Cathedral of the Intercession, known as Saint Basil's, built on the moat in 1555 to mark the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan three years before; it was finished by 1561. In 1612 Prince Dmitry Pozharsky crossed the square into the Kremlin during the expulsion of the Polish army, and afterwards founded the Kazan Cathedral for the icon that had followed his army. The Spasskaya Tower received its tent roof and clock in 1624–25 to a design by Christopher Galloway of Scotland. The square was also a place of execution (Stenka Razin died here in 1671), though the killings took place a few metres from Lobnoye Mesto rather than on it.

In 1804 the square was paved in stone at the merchants' request. After the invasion and fire of 1812 the moat was filled in 1813, and Joseph Bové built new trading lines in the Empire style. Ivan Martos's bronze monument to Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, paid for by subscription, was unveiled in February 1818 in front of the upper rows.

The Historical Museum was built in 1875–1883 to Vladimir Sherwood's design. Bové's lines came down and were replaced between 1890 and 1893 by the upper trading rows, later GUM, by Alexander Pomerantsev and Vladimir Shukhov, whose glass roofs over the arcades used some 60,000 panes; they opened on 2 December 1893. A tram crossed the square from 1909, over protest.

The Kremlin was shelled from the square in 1917, and that November about 250 men killed in the October fighting were buried in two mass graves by the Senate Tower, beginning the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. A wooden mausoleum for Lenin went up in 1924, replaced in 1929–30 by Alexey Shchusev's granite and labradorite building; for its opening the cobbles were relaid in Karelian gabbro-dolerite setts. The tram was lifted in August 1930, the Minin and Pozharsky monument moved to Saint Basil's, the Resurrection Gate dismantled in 1931 and the Kazan Cathedral demolished in 1936.

On 7 November 1941, with the city besieged, troops paraded and left for the front. The square was camouflaged with wooden structures imitating streets, the mausoleum boxed in and Saint Basil's domes covered; between 30 September 1941 and 20 April 1942 eighteen high-explosive bombs and more than 150 incendiaries fell on it. At the Victory Parade of 24 June 1945 the standards of defeated German armies were thrown down at the foot of the mausoleum.

The square became a pedestrian zone in 1963, apart from the road across it to the Saviour Gate. Work on the mausoleum in 1972–74 uncovered part of the Alevizov moat. Burials stopped after Konstantin Chernenko's funeral in 1985; more than a hundred urns are walled into the Kremlin wall, among them Gagarin's and Krupskaya's, and the necropolis opens on the days the mausoleum, where Lenin's embalmed body lies, admits visitors.

UNESCO listed the Kremlin and Red Square in 1990, and rebuilding began the next year: the Kazan Cathedral was completed in 1993, the Resurrection Gate and the chapel of the Iberian icon in 1996. Concerts have been held since 1992 and the first ice rink laid in December 2000. A regulation approved by Vladimir Putin in late 2013 limited events to a fixed list, the Victory Day parade and the New Year rink among them, after figures showing access had been restricted or closed close to 200 days a year.