Bolotnaya Square

Bolotnaya Square occupies Balchug Island in the Yakimanka district, between Faleyevsky Lane and Bolotnaya and Serafimovicha streets. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the site was known as Tsaritsyn Meadow, and from 1962 to 1993 it bore the name Repin Square. Today it is a pedestrian space with fountains and an embankment, redeveloped as part of the “My Street” program.

In the eleventh century a marsh stood here, along which the Volotskaya road passed; the marsh was later gradually drained, but the houses that sprang up there repeatedly burned down in frequent fires. In 1495, by order of Ivan III, a large orchard was planted on the burned-over site, and the name “Boloto” (Marsh), which stuck in popular usage, was first recorded in documents in 1514. For a long time the site served as a venue for streltsy drills, fistfights, and public executions: the leaders of the Copper Riot of 1662 were put to death here, an associate of Archpriest Avvakum was burned, the remains of Stepan Razin were displayed, and the last person executed here, in 1775, was Yemelyan Pugachev.

After the fire of 1701, the orchard was not replanted, and the now-empty space came to be used for fireworks displays and coronation celebrations, which is how the name Tsaritsyn Meadow took hold. In 1786, on the initiative of the Moscow commander-in-chief Yakov Bryus, a trading square was set up here: grain, oats, and groats were sold from carts, and shops sprang up along Balchug that stood until 1917. In the 1830s–1840s the area was built up with stone warehouses and storage sheds, and the market effectively set food prices for the whole of Moscow Province; the complex's main building was a Gostiny Dvor designed by architect Mikhail Bykovsky.

In Soviet times the storage sheds were converted into warehouses and workers' dormitories, and the Gostiny Dvor was demolished, though the plan for full residential development of the square was never carried out. During the defense of Moscow, an anti-aircraft battery stood here, destroyed by a German bomb in December 1941. For the capital's 800th anniversary in 1947, architect Vitaly Dolganov laid out a small park on the square with granite columns and a fountain, and in 1958 a monument to the painter Repin was installed here — hence the square's brief renaming to Repin Square.

In 1994 the Tretyakovsky Bridge was built across the Drainage Canal, and in 2001 Mikhail Shemyakin's monument “Children — Victims of Adult Vices” appeared in the small park. In December 2011 and May 2012 the square became the site of major sociopolitical rallies that drew, according to various estimates, anywhere from several thousand to tens of thousands of participants; the criminal proceedings that followed became known in history as the “Bolotnaya Square case.”

Since 2013, vehicle traffic across the square has been closed, and a 2017 reconstruction designed by the Dutch firm Okra added a waterside terrace and a dry fountain along the embankment. Today Bolotnaya Square combines memories of its commercial past with the role of a modern urban space for strolling and relaxing beside the Drainage Canal.