Russia on Moscow map: what do our city’s streets celebrate in their names?

You can find places from all over Russia in the names of Moscow streets, boulevards and squares. Forests, mountains, rivers and seas, along with cities, were frequently taken as names, especially in the Soviet times, when Moscow was growing quickly and needed names for its avenues and alleys.

On Russia Day, let’s have a walk around Moscow to look for our country’s geography on the map. Our assistant will be a tourist guide, Moscow historian, head of the City Tour Bureau of the Museum of Moscow, Andrey Klyuev.

Geography and history

Some Moscow streets and squares are good for learning Russian history, on top of geography. We’re talking about names that have been there for centuries.

“The streets of the historic city were initially directions: Tverskaya was, obviously, going to Tver, Varvarka was at the start of the road to Vladimir and Ryazan, and so forth. Those roads were going every which way from the very first fortress on Borovitsky Hill. Residential houses, craftsmen’s workshops, stores were springing up along them, so gradually, they were absorbed into the city,” Mr. Klyuev tells us.

That way, by the start of the 14 th century, the road to Dmitrov spawned Dmitrovskaya Sloboda (neighborhood) where tradesmen and craftsmen lived. Today, Dmitrov is a local urban center in the Greater Moscow, but in the 15 th-16 th centuries, it was one of the principal cities in the Grand Duchy of Moscow. When the White City wall was put up in the late 16 th century, it divided the street into two: that’s how Bolshaya and Malaya Dmitrovkas came to be.

Many squares along the modern Garden Ring were initially passages through the rampart of earth that used to surround the city from the late 16 th to the early 19 th century. Kaluzhskaya Square got its name after the Kaluga road that used to start there. It was directly behind the Kaluzhskiye Gate in the rampart. In the late 17 th century it became a marketplace for selling oats, hay, bread and other goods; in 1714, the cattle market was relocated there from Myasnitskiye Gate.

Smolenskaya Square was also once a passage through the earth rampart. The Staraya Smolenskaya road that later became Novaya Smolenskaya, used to start there. In the 15–16 th centuries, it led not only to Smolensk, but to the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Smolensk was a part of the Russian Tsardom, but during the Time of Trouble, it had been briefly captured by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, so for a while, it was a foreign city.

Furthermore, in the 19 th century, the square housed one of the largest merchandise markets in Moscow. The place was simultaneously a flea market. Vladimir Gilyarovsky thus described Smolensky Market in his book Moscow and Muscovites. “Sukharevka was a child of war. Smolensky Market was a child of the plague. It predated Sukharevka by 35 years… After the plague outbreak in Moscow the authorities declared that townsfolk was allowed to sell secondhand clothes only at Smolensky Market, and only on Sundays, to avoid the disease spread”.

The road to Serpukhov started from Serpukhovsky Wall and Serpukhovskaya Square. In the 14 th century, Serpukhov was a large and important city, the seat of power of the Grand Duchy of Serpukhov, an ally of Moscow.

“This square’s history is similar, but there was another earth rampart here: not Zemlyanoy, but Kamer-Kollezhsky. It was built in the 1740 s not as a fortification, but as a customs border: there, they controlled the goods entering the city, to tax them and turn away smugglers. There were customs checkpoints along it, where they collected customs duties. One of them was Serpukhovskaya Zastava (checkpoint); after the rampart was demolished, it became Serpukhovskaya Square,” the historian explains.

Crimea Host and old highways

There are multiple names on the map of Moscow, ostensibly associated with Crimea: Krymsky Bridge, Krymsky Wall, Krymskaya Square, Krymskaya Embankment. In reality, they’re not directly related to the peninsula, but have been named after an old Moscow place name.

There used to be Krymsky Ford roughly where Krymsky Bridge is now; the host of the Crimean Khanate used it to cross the Moskva River during their raids to Moscow. Later, Crimean Tatars established an embassy around that place, to start building diplomatic relations. Krymsky Bridge, together with the square, the wall and the embankment, now serve to remind us about those events.

Some streets may be slightly confusing for a tourist even timeline-wise. For example, although avenues (Prospekts) only started appearing on the map of Moscow in the 1960 s, the main thoroughfare now called Leningradsky Prospekt is way older than that.

”Saint Petersburg Highway that started from Tverskaya Zastava Square came to be in the 18 th century. After the Revolution of 1917, when they renamed Petrograd to Leningrad in 1924, the motorway changed its name accordingly to Leningradskoye,” Mr. Klyuev continues. “Prospekts started appearing in Moscow after the war, in the 1960 s, so the part of Leningradskoye Motorway from Belorussky Train Station to Sokol Metro station became Leningradsky Prospekt”.

Another highway with even deeper history that’s seen at first sight is Mozhayskoye Motorway. Mozhaysk was a very important city for the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the 15 th and the 16 th centuries: the border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ran roughly along the modern Moscow region border, so Mozhaysk was a border city. It was intermittently within the Russian border and beyond it after the next war. The road to Mozhaysk was the shortest way to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was used both by tradesmen and by Russian troops.

From Pskov to Kamchatka

A great number of streets, alleys, boulevards and avenues got their names in the 1960 s−1980 s. The city was expanding rapidly, lots of new transport arteries were appearing, and they all needed their names. The Russian geography was a logical and virtually limitless source for it.

According to Andrey Klyuev, streets and other objects got names according to compass points. For example, in the south and south-east of Moscow, there are Voronezhskaya and Krasnodarskaya streets and Volgogradsky Prospekt, while Murmansky Proyezd and Novgorodskaya Street are in the north. There are Pskovskaya and Vyazemskaya streets in the west and Anadyrsky Proyezd, Kamchatskaya and Irkutskaya streets in the east.

Often, the streets’ names are tied by meaning, helping our imaginations paint pictures of polar frost in the north of Moscow, or feel warm sea breeze in the south.

For example, in Losinoostrovsky district, you can find Tayozhnaya, Norilskaya and Taimyrskaya streets close together. The last one is named after the northernmost Russian peninsula. Additionally, there’s Chelyuskinskaya Street close by. It commemorates steamboat Chelyuskin that drifted in the Arctic Ocean for several months with crew on board.

In the south of Moscow, Zyuzino district, the names are the opposite: warm and sunny. There, side by side, there are Chernomorsky and Simferopolsky boulevards, with Azovskaya Street, named after the Sea of Azov, close by. In the same area, there’s Artekovskaya Street, bringing to mind images of Artek, the famous children’s recreation center in Gurzuf, on Black Sea coast.

In the spirit of geographical approach, they named streets not only after Russian cities, but also after mountains, seas, lakes, plains and uplands. That’s why the map of Moscow includes the entire range of the diverse Russian nature: Altaiskaya Street, Kavkazsky Boulevard, Sibirsky and Valdaysky proyezds, Kaspiyskaya and Okskaya streets, Volzhsky Boulevard.

Place names like that are also sometimes grouped together. In the eastern parts of Moscow, Golyanovo district, there are several transport arteries with names related to rivers. 1 st and 2 nd Irtyshsky proyezds, along with Amurskaya Street. On top of that, Baikalskaya Street, reminding us about the greatest fresh water lake on the planet, is also there.

“Indeed, you can use the map of Moscow to track the entire Russian geography. And not only Russian. Most of those names were given in the late Soviet period, so many of them, such as Tashkentsky Pereulok or Samarkandsky Boulevard, celebrate the Soviet Republics. But that’s another story entirely,” Mr. Klyuev points out.