Moscow Guide
Red Square
The Kremlin wall and its towers
The Kremlin wall constitutes a kind of Soviet pantheon, containing the remains of up to 400 bodies. Visitors exiting Lenin's Mausoleum pass a mass grave of Bolsheviks who perished during the battle for Moscow in 1917, to reach an array of luminaries whose ashes are interred in the Kremlin wall. These include Lenin's wife Krupskaya, and his lover Inessa Armand; the writer Maxim Gorky; the founder of the secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky; various foreign Communist leaders; and the world's first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin. Beyond lies a select group of Soviet leaders, distinguished by idealized busts on plinths. The first to be encountered is Chernenko's (looking smarter than he ever did in real life), followed by an avuncular Andropov, a pompous Brezhnev and a benign-looking Stalin (whose tomb is marked by lilies, as well as red roses).
The Kremlin wall averages 19m high and 6.5m wide, topped with swallow-tailed crenellations and defended by eight towers mostly built by Italian architects in the 1490s. The distinctive jade-green spires were added in the seventeenth century, and the ruby-red stars (which revolve in the wind) in 1937. At the northern end is the round Corner Arsenal Tower, which takes its name from the adjacent Kremlin Arsenal. Further along is the triple-tiered St Nicholas Tower, built by Pietro Antonio Solari. The tower's massive red star (3.75m wide and 1.5 tonnes in weight) gives it a total height of 70.4m.