Moscow Guide
The Beliy Gorod
The Beliy Gorod, or "White Town", is the historic name of the residential district that encircled the Kremlin and the Kitay-gorod – derived from the white stone ramparts erected around it at the end of the sixteenth century. It remains a useful designation for the area within the horseshoe-shaped Boulevard Ring (Bulvarnoe koltso), laid out on the rampart sites after the great fire of 1812. Despite widening and modernization, many of the boulevards are still divided by elongated parks with wrought-iron lampposts and fences, statues and urns redolent of nineteenth-century Moscow, and many squares bear the names of the original gate-towers.
Much of the cultural life and other pleasures of Moscow are found in the Beliy Gorod, from the Bolshoy Theatre, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Conservatory, to restaurants, nightlife, and piquant juxtapositions of old and new Russia – which often turn out to be much the same. The rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, decades after Stalin destroyed the original, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reinventing the past, as brash new banks pose as pre-Revolutionary financial houses, and casinos and nightclubs call themselves Chekhov and Stanislavsky. The discordances are echoed by the architecture: Stalinist behemoths with Italianate loggias stitched across a patchwork of Neoclassical and Style Moderne backstreets, studded with medieval monasteries. A visit to the "KGB Museum" attached to the infamous Lubyanka is not to be missed, nor a wander around the one-time Ukrainian quarter.
The Beliy Gorod's web-like layout and hilly topography make orientation quite difficult.