1 May Square

1 May Square spreads out before the eastern wall of the Kazan Kremlin, by its main entrance gate, the Savior Tower, and is considered the city’s oldest square. Almost all the tourist routes of the historic centre converge here: Kremlyovskaya Street begins from this point, while the square also descends toward Tysyacheletiya Square and Bauman Street, and the northern vestibule exit of the Kremlyovskaya metro station is located nearby.

The square’s original name was Spasskaya, after the neighbouring 16th-century Kremlin tower. In the 17th century it came to be called Ivanovskaya, after the nearby St John the Baptist Monastery, and from the second half of the 19th century until the Revolution it was known as Alexandrovskaya, in honour of the monument to Emperor Alexander II erected here in 1895. The current name, given in 1918 in honour of the day of workers’ solidarity, has now been borne by the square for more than a century. For a long time the area was separated from the city by a deep defensive moat, crossed by a wooden bridge — the moat was filled in and the bridge dismantled only at the end of the 19th century.

For centuries the square served as the city’s public centre: tsarist decrees were proclaimed here, ceremonial events and public punishments took place, and in July 1774 it was from here that Pugachev’s rebels launched their unsuccessful artillery assault on the Kremlin walls. In the early 20th century, during the revolutionary upheavals of 1905–1907 and 1917, the square repeatedly became a site of mass rallies. For a long time, trade also flourished here — the square once held shops and one of the few surviving Gostiny Dvor (merchant arcade) buildings in Russia, later converted into the city’s museum of local history, and today occupied by the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan.

The fate of the monument to Alexander II proved short-lived: in 1918 it was pulled down, and a short-lived monument, “Liberated Labour,” was erected on the empty pedestal, which soon deteriorated and was removed. The descent from the square toward Tysyacheletiya Square and Bauman Street is the only place in the city paved with rounded cobblestones; in the 1980s, ahead of a visit by a Soviet leader, the paving was covered with asphalt overnight, and a few weeks later every stone was cleaned by hand to restore the historic paving.

Today the square is bordered by the Kremlin’s eastern wall with its three towers, the National Museum of the Republic, the complex of buildings housing the city hall and city duma, the St John the Baptist Monastery, and the beginning of Kremlyovskaya Street. Public transport does not run through the square itself, but the nearby metro station makes it a convenient point for walking tours and a traditional spot for citizens’ wedding photo shoots.

Having journeyed from a border space by the fortress moat to the city’s central pedestrian square, 1 May Square has preserved its role as the connecting link between the Kremlin and the rest of historic Kazan — a place where the trading, administrative and memorial threads of the city’s history converge.