Inner Moscow functions like a typical central business district. In this area are concentrated most of the government offices and administrative headquarters of state bodies, most of the hotels and larger shops, and the principal theatres, museums, and art galleries. The inner city’s function as a residential area has not been completely lost, however; although many large prerevolution and Soviet-style apartment buildings were transformed into offices in the 1990s, some quiet residential neighbourhoods linger within the Garden Ring, mostly consisting of luxury apartments for Russia’s new elite.

In the remainder of the central part of Moscow, within the Garden Ring, are buildings representative of every period of Moscow’s development from the 15th century to the present day. Scattered through the inner city are several fine examples of 17th-century church architecture, notably the Church of All Saints of Kulishki, built in the 1670s and ’80s to commemorate those killed in the Battle of Kulikovo (1380), and the Church of the Nativity of Putniki (1649–52). This was the period of development of the Moscow Baroque style; one of its best examples, located outside the city centre on the site of the former village of Fili, is the Church of the Intercession (1693). Buildings of the Classical period—beginning about the latter half of the 18th century and covering the rebuilding of Moscow after the fire of 1812—abound within the Garden Ring and the Boulevard Ring (the latter forming a rough horseshoe north of the Moscow River around the Kremlin and Kitay-gorod) and in Zamoskvoreche, a largely residential district south of the river. Notable examples are the old university and the former meeting place of the assembly of nobles with its Hall of Columns (now the House of Trade Unions), both built by Matvei Kazakov in the 1780s; the elegant Pashkov House (1785–86), now part of the Russian State Library but still commonly referred to as the V.I. Lenin Library; the Lunin House (1818–23), now the Museum of Oriental Art; the Manezh (Riding School; 1817), which is now used as an exhibition hall; and the magnificent Bolshoi Theatre (1821–24), rebuilt in 1856 after a fire. Toward the end of the 19th century and continuing into the early 20th, buildings in the revivalist Old Russian style were built, including the Tretyakov Gallery (1906) and—just outside the Garden Ring—the Yaroslavl railway station (1902–04).

Side by side with the old appeared new buildings in the modern, functional style of the 1920s, in the ponderous, often overly ornate style of the later period of Joseph Stalin’s rule (1945–53), and in the high-rise concrete and glass predominant since the 1960s. Among more imaginative examples of later architecture are the Taganka Theatre (1983) and the Gazprom and Lukoil office buildings (1990s).

In the Soviet period much more open space was created, especially by constructing large squares such as Manezhnaya. Many streets were widened—in particular, Tverskaya Prospekt (called Gorky Prospekt, for Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, from 1932 to 1992), one of Moscow’s principal radial roads, which is lined with large shops, hotels, and offices. The Garden Ring itself has been widened to form a broad highway with multiple lanes in each direction and with overpasses where it is intersected by the main radial routes. In the 1960s a new radial street, Kalinina, was built through an area of older housing westward from the Kremlin to the Moscow River; it is lined by high-rise office and apartment buildings, linked at street and second-floor levels by a shopping mall. At its outer end rises a lofty three-winged building overlooking the river, which for many years housed offices of Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance; disbanded in 1991) and now serves as the headquarters for the Moscow city government. Yet just next to this bustling thoroughfare is Arbat Prospekt (also called Old Arbat), one of the most picturesque streets of Moscow and now closed to vehicular traffic.

Most of the historic buildings of central Moscow have been preserved—since the 1960s, much careful restoration and repair work has been undertaken—but some architectural monuments disappeared in the early Soviet period. In 1931 Stalin demolished the 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and, beginning in 1958, a vast open-air swimming pool occupied its foundation, in accordance with Khrushchev’s orders. The cathedral, however, was restored to its original design and reopened in 1997. Its massive gilded cupola overlooking the Kremlin is one of the major focal points of the downtown skyline.

The middle zone

Beyond the Garden Ring and approximately as far as the Moscow Little Ring Railway lies a zone mostly of late 18th- and 19th-century development. Within it are many factories and the principal railway stations and freight yards. The Likhachyov Automobile Works and its associated housing occupy some of the southeastern sector. Enveloped within this zone are further examples of the best of Classical Moscow, such as the 18th-century palace that houses the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences on Leninsky Prospekt. Also to the southwest, on the banks of the Moscow River, are the most important of the fortified monasteries, the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, with its beautiful Smolensk Cathedral, whose tall bell tower (1690) dominates the churches and buildings within the crenellated walls and towers of the convent. The cathedral now houses the Novodevichy Convent Museum, and the complex includes a cemetery where Khrushchev and other prominent figures from Soviet history are buried. Just south of Novodevichy, within the large loop of the river and facing the Vorobyëvy Hills, is the sports complex known as Luzhniki Park, dominated by the huge football (soccer) stadium formerly known as Central Lenin Stadium (built 1955–56).

The middle zone underwent the most urban renewal in Soviet times. Among the features of the present Moscow skyline are the ornate vysotkas (“sky houses”), imposing buildings of about 20 to 30 stories along the Garden Ring that were built in the late 1940s and early 1950s under Stalin. In the same Stalin-period style are the Ukraina Hotel across the river and the gigantic building in the Moscow State University complex on the Vorobyëvy Hills. Most of the renewal that has taken place since 1960 consists of extensive neighbourhoods of wide streets lined with rows of apartment buildings. A number of areas still have narrow streets of 19th-century housing and smaller factories.

Major post-Soviet developments in the middle zone included the erection of a large Catholic church on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya, a third highway circling the periphery of the middle zone, and large-scale upgrading of housing stock; indeed, the term yevroremont (“European-style repair”) was coined in the 1990s to describe this Muscovite refurbishment, generally referring to the updating of utilities and amenities to Western standards.