Two Decades of Moscow's Legendary Manezh Square

Since 1991, when Muscovites gathered on the downtown Manezh Square to celebrate the end of communism in the wake of the failed August coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, this site just north of the Kremlin has been a focal point of Russia's post-Soviet transformation.



Manezh Square was thoroughly renovated after the Soviet collapse. Mayor Yury Luzhkov in the 1990s sent the diggers in to excavate a vast hole that he filled with a glitzy underground shopping mall and a street-level McDonald's complete with a "walk-thru" window.



But even before then, the area has reflected the changing tides of Russian life. A medieval monastery once inhabited the site, but was torn down in the 1700s and replaced with taverns and apartments. The Soviet declared the neighborhood to be overly bourgeois in 1932 and leveled the area to create what is now Manezh Square.



See our previous Photo Gallery:

Putin T-shirts Go on Sale in Moscow