Lenin Garden

Lenin Garden is a green area right in the heart of Kazan, part of the Vakhitovsky District; together with its neighbour, Black Lake park, it occupies the same low-lying stretch of the historic centre. The garden covers 2.3 hectares, and its grounds bear traces of several eras at once — from a pre-revolutionary city garden to a Soviet memorial ensemble and a present-day memorial marker.

The garden was laid out in 1891 on the site where, a year earlier, the Kazan Scientific and Industrial Exhibition had taken place on what was then Nikolayevskaya Square. The original name — Nikolayevsky Garden — is often mistakenly linked to Emperor Nicholas I, although the garden was actually named after Tsesarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich, who later ascended the throne as Nicholas II and had patronized that very exhibition. The present name, Lenin Garden, became attached to the park in the early 1920s.

As early as 1894 a fountain in the shape of two cupids supporting a large basin was installed in the centre of the garden, paid for by Pyotr Gubonin, the merchant who built Kazan’s water supply system. The garden underwent a real transformation in 1924: to a design by architects Fyodor Gavrilov and Dmitry Fyodorov, the lower terrace was joined to the Klinichesky Garden lying above it by a grand Constructivist-style staircase, built by the labour of about one hundred and fifty workers and students. A bronze bust of Lenin was placed on the upper landing of the staircase that same year, replaced a year later by a full-length statue — this was how Kazan got its first memorial ensemble dedicated to the leader of the revolution.

In the 1930s the care of the garden was entrusted to the Red Army House, and this quickly changed its appearance: lighting was restored, the fountain repaired, the garden acquired its own orchestra and began hosting mass festivities; at the same time a Constructivist-style building went up in the garden’s north-eastern corner — Kazan’s first public lavatory, which remained in use until the 1990s. The garden changed far more significantly in the 1970s, when the upper terrace was built over with a new academic building of Kazan University and an extension of the Lobachevsky Library: the summer cinema, dance stage and shooting gallery that had operated here earlier had already closed in the 1960s, and in 1977 the bronze statue of Lenin was moved to one of the city’s schools.

For Kazan’s millennium, in 2003–2005, the garden underwent a major reconstruction, and on 30 October 2004 a monument to the memory of Tatarstan’s victims of political repression was solemnly unveiled in its western part — four stone steles on a shared pedestal, bearing the single word ‘Forgive’ translated into four languages: Russian, Tatar, English and Arabic. Memorial events have been held here every year since on the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression. Today Lenin Garden combines the functions of a quiet garden by the university’s walls and a place of public memory, while remaining one of the oldest landscaped spaces in Kazan’s historic centre.