Proximity to Red Square makes ploshchad Revolyutsii (Revolution Square) a meeting place for Communist and far-right agitators – particularly on Sundays, when "Red Grannies" and black-shirts hawk Soviet memorabilia and anti-Semitic tracts outside the former Lenin Museum. This red-brick, Neo-Russian edifice, built for the Tsarist City Duma, once boasted the world's largest collection of Leninalia, including his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost – expropriated from a millionaire – and a replica of his study in the Kremlin. After the 1991 putsch, it lost its state funding and was forced to shed 150 staff, but struggled on until 1993, when Luzhkov decreed its eviction. The building hasn't been open since then. The flight of steps alongside leads through a passage to Nikolskaya ulitsa.

At present, the ploshchad is a dreary expanse bordering a building site where the Moskva Hotel existed until 2004. This dour monolith was built in the 1930s to accommodate delegates to Party congresses; the British defector Guy Burgess lived there until his death in 1963. Famously, its asymmetrical facade facing Manezhnaya ploshchad arose because its architect submitted two variations to Stalin, who approved both, not realizing that he was supposed to choose between them – no one dared correct his mistake. Had the 1935 city reconstruction plan been fully realized, it would have faced the Palace of Soviets down a wide avenue, intended as the focal point of the city. When the US architect Frank Lloyd Wright was asked for his opinion of the hotel, he replied "It's the ugliest thing I have ever seen" – which his interpreter tactfully translated as "I'm very impressed".