The Moscow Kremlin is the oldest and most famous of Russia's kremlins - the fortified centers that anchored medieval Russian cities. The current walls, red brick extending 2,235 meters around 28 hectares, were built between 1485 and 1495 by Italian architects hired by Ivan III. Twenty towers punctuate the circuit, the Spasskaya Tower's clock chiming the hours across Red Square.

Within the walls, cathedrals cluster around Cathedral Square - the Dormition Cathedral where Tsars were crowned, the Annunciation Cathedral where they were baptized, the Archangel Cathedral where they were buried. The Ivan the Great Bell Tower rises 81 meters, the tallest structure in Russia until the 19th century. The Kremlin Armoury holds the Tsarist treasures: Faberge eggs, coronation regalia, the fur-trimmed Cap of Monomakh worn by monarchs from the 15th to the 18th century. The Grand Kremlin Palace, built for Nicholas I in the 1840s, now serves as presidential residence. The walls that kept out Mongols and Poles now keep out tourists, except in designated areas, while the business of ruling Russia continues inside.

The name has nothing to do with communism. 'Krasnaya' meant 'beautiful' in Old Russian before it evolved to mean 'red' - the square was the Beautiful Square long before the revolution painted it with ideology. It stretches along the Kremlin's eastern wall, cobblestones spreading 330 meters by 70 meters, the setting for military parades, public executions, political demonstrations, and now tourists photographing St. Basil's Cathedral.

St. Basil's was built between 1555 and 1561 to commemorate Ivan the Terrible's conquest of Kazan. The eight onion domes surrounding a central spire, each differently colored and patterned, form the most recognizable silhouette in Russia. Legend claims Ivan blinded the architects to prevent them from creating anything comparable - the same legend told about Prague's clockmaker, probably equally false. GUM, the massive department store facing the Kremlin across the square, housed Soviet state shops and now hosts luxury brands. Lenin's Mausoleum sits against the Kremlin wall, the preserved body still on display despite periodic debates about burial. The beautiful square accumulated layers of meaning until it became inseparable from Russian identity.

Stalin ordered the Moscow Metro built as proof that socialism could out-build capitalism. The first line opened in 1935, its stations designed as 'palaces for the people' - marble columns, bronze sculptures, chandeliers, mosaics depicting Soviet achievements. No expense was spared for infrastructure that would demonstrate the superiority of the communist system.

Komsomolskaya station celebrates Russian military victories with baroque excess - ceiling mosaics of Alexander Nevsky and Kutuzov, golden chandeliers worthy of Versailles. Mayakovskaya, a monument to aviation, won the Grand Prix at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Ploshchad Revolyutsii features 76 bronze sculptures of Soviet citizens - the soldier's dog and the student's shoe are polished bright by commuters who touch them for luck. The system now stretches over 400 kilometers with 250 stations, carrying nine million passengers daily. The newer stations are functional rather than palatial, but the original lines remain underground museums of Soviet ambition, the most beautiful transit system ever built.

Between 1947 and 1953, Stalin ordered construction of seven skyscrapers that would define Moscow's skyline and announce Soviet architectural ambition to the world. The buildings combined American height with Russian ornamentation - the Empire State Building reimagined with spires and socialist realism. An eighth was planned for a site near the Kremlin; only the foundation was completed before Stalin's death halted the project.

The tallest, Moscow State University, rises 240 meters on Sparrow Hills, its central tower visible from across the city. The others house the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, luxury hotels, apartment buildings for the elite. The style is called Stalinist architecture or, less charitably, Soviet wedding-cake Gothic - massive, ornate, assertively vertical. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev denounced the expense and excess; subsequent Soviet buildings were brutalist boxes. But the Seven Sisters remain, landmarks of an era when ideology demanded architectural expression, when the state built monuments to itself because it could.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and Moscow became the capital of something harder to define - a Russian Federation that was neither communist nor fully capitalist, neither democracy nor dictatorship. The 1990s were chaotic: oligarchs accumulated fortunes from privatized industry, organized crime flourished, the economy lurched through crisis. The 2000s brought stability of a different kind: oil wealth, concentrated power, the reconstruction of state authority under a former KGB officer.

Moscow today is a city of contrasts sharpened to extremes. The Moscow International Business Center - 'Moscow City' - rises on a Moskva River bend, glass towers housing corporations and banks, a skyline that could be Dubai or Shanghai. Meanwhile, communal apartments from the Soviet era still house families in shared kitchens. The metro carries billionaires and pensioners in the same cars. The Kremlin broadcasts power as it has for centuries while social media spreads dissent that once would have meant the Gulag. The city that was Third Rome, heart of the Soviet empire, and crime capital of the 1990s continues to reinvent itself, its identity as contested as the square they call beautiful.