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Every visitor to Moscow is irresistibly drawn to Red Square, the historic and spiritual heart of the city, so loaded with associations and drama that it seems to embody all of Russia's triumphs and tragedies. In fact, the name Red Square (Krasnaya ploshchad) has nothing to do with communism, but derives from krasniy, the old Russian word for "beautiful". The square came into being towards the end of the fifteenth century - after Ivan III ordered the clearance of the wooden houses and traders' stalls that huddled below the eastern wall of the Kremlin - and remained an important political and cultural landmark until Peter the Great moved the capital to St Petersburg in 1712. Only when the Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow in 1918 did the square regain its political significance as the centre for huge parades and demonstrations. On the west side the Lenin Mausoleum squats beneath the ramparts and towers of the Kremlin and on the other sprawls the long facade of GUM - what was during Soviet times the "State Department Store" (Mon-Sat 8am-9pm, Sun 11am-8pm) - built in 1890-93, and now a hymn to expensive fashion outlets, while St Basil's Cathedral erupts in a profusion of onion domes and spires at the far end. In post-Communist Russia, the Lenin Mausoleum (Mavzoley V.I. Lenina; Tues, Wed, Thurs, Sat & Sun 10am-1pm; free) tends to be regarded either as an awkward reminder or a cherished relic of the old days. Most people come to see Lenin's corpse, softly spotlit in a crystal casket, wearing a polka-dot tie and a dark suit-cum-shroud, his body shrunken and waxy, his beard wispy and his fingers discoloured. While leaving Lenin's body in situ seems inappropriate (he apparently wished to be buried beside his mother in St Petersburg's Volkov Cemetery), the Mausoleum deserves to be preserved as a stylish piece of architecture and a bizarre, modern counterpart to the pyramids of ancient Egypt. When Boris Yeltsin raised the question of closing the Mausoleum in 1997, Communist extremists blew up a monument to Nicholas II on the outskirts of Moscow in protest, and although the subject occasionally comes up, emotions are always high and it is allowed to drop after a few weeks of hysteria. The famous goose-stepping guard which used to stand watch over the Mausoleum was removed - only to be reinstated, mainly for the tourists, at the more politically correct grave of the Unknown Soldier just round the corner. The Kremlin wall , behind the Mausoleum - 19m high and 6.5m thick - contains a mass grave of Bolsheviks, who perished during the battle for Moscow in 1917, and the ashes of an array of luminaries, including writer Maxim Gorky and Yuriy Gagarin, the first man in space, and John Reed, the American communist who witnessed the Revolution (unmemorably played by Warren Beatty in the film Reds ). Beyond lie the graves of a select group of Soviet leaders, each with its own bust: Chernenko, Andropov, a pompous Brezhnev and a benign-looking Stalin. No description can do justice to St Basil's Cathedral (sobor Vasiliya Blazhennovo; Mon & Wed-Sun 10am-4.30pm; $5), silhouetted against the skyline where Red Square slopes down towards the Moskva River. Commissioned by Ivan the Terrible to celebrate his capture of the Tatar stronghold of Kazan in 1552, its popular title commemorates a "holy fool", St Basil the Blessed, who foretold the fire that swept Moscow in 1547, and was later buried in the Trinity Cathedral that then stood on this site. In modern times, this unique masterpiece was almost destroyed by Stalin, who resented the fact that it prevented his soldiers from leaving Red Square en masse. At the other end of the square is the State History Museum (Istoricheskiy muzey; Mon & Wed-Sun 11am-7pm; $6), with only a tiny proportion of its varied collection of everything from archeological finds to Soviet badges and textiles on display. On the other side of it, just to the north of the square, is the supreme symbol of Moscow's exchange of communism for capitalism: in place of the empty space formerly used for displays of military hardware and demonstrations is Luzhkov's vast underground shopping centre, Okhotniy ryad , buried beneath a mass of fussy and tasteless landscaping.
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