The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Russia
6 places ยท updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Russia are Spasskaya Tower, The Motherland Calls and Red Square. The list covers 6 squares, streets and monuments. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Russia's squares and monuments are built on an imperial scale. Moscow grew around the walls and towers of the Kremlin, St. Petersburg was laid out from scratch as a planned European capital with vast parade grounds, and the Soviet state later used colossal sculpture to tell its own story. Between them stand the industrial towns of the Urals, whose ironmasters left monuments of their own.
Red Square in Moscow runs along the Kremlin wall past St. Basil's Cathedral and the Lenin Mausoleum, and its name comes from an old Russian word that meant both red and beautiful. Above it rises the Spasskaya Tower, built in 1491 by the Italian architect Pietro Antonio Solari and later crowned with a tent roof and the clock whose chimes became the sound of the country. In St. Petersburg, Palace Square spreads between the Winter Palace and the curved General Staff Building, with the granite Alexander Column at its centre.
The Soviet monuments are among the largest sculptures ever made. The Motherland Calls in Volgograd, unveiled in 1967 on the Mamayev Kurgan, raises a sword over the city that witnessed the Battle of Stalingrad. Vera Mukhina's Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, cast in stainless steel for the Paris Exposition of 1937, holds a hammer and sickle aloft in Moscow. In the Urals, the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk, built by the Demidov ironmasters in the eighteenth century, has tilted noticeably for most of its life.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spasskaya Tower | Clock tower | |
| 2 | The Motherland Calls | War memorial | |
| 3 | Red Square | Square | โ |
| 4 | Worker and Kolkhoz Woman | Sculpture | |
| 5 | Palace Square | Square | โ |
| 6 | Leaning Tower of Nevyansk | Clock tower |
01 Spasskaya Tower
Russia ยท 0.5 km from Moscow55.752ยฐ N 37.621ยฐ E
ะฎัะธะน ะ.ะ. ยท CC BY 4.0 In 1624โ25 the tower became the first in the Kremlin to receive its tall pinnacled top, designed by Bazhen Ogurtsov together with Christopher Galloway. A clock has hung on the tower since at least the sixteenth century; the chimes, known as the Kremlin kuranty, mark official Moscow time. The present name comes from the icon of the Saviour Not Made by Hands placed above the inner side of the gate in 1658.
Did you know? The current chimes were built by the Butenop brothers in 1851โ52 and played a regimental march and Bortnyansky's hymn at set hours.
02 The Motherland Calls
Russia ยท 4.4 km from Volgograd48.742ยฐ N 44.537ยฐ E
Image by alex1983 from Pixabay The ensemble was the work of the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich with the architect Yakov Belopolsky, the same pair behind the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin's Treptower Park. Their early designs were more modest: a granite group of a kneeling soldier before a female figure of the Motherland, around 30 metres high.
Did you know? Its concrete used a special mix developed for Moscow's Ostankino television tower, poured by hand in half-metre layers from pedestal to neck.
03 Red Square
Russia ยท 0.4 km from Moscow55.754ยฐ N 37.620ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by joneybrain from Pixabay Almost every building around it is a landmark in its own right. At the southern end, Saint Basil's Cathedral โ the Intercession on the Moat โ was built in 1555โ1561 for Ivan the Terrible to mark the capture of Kazan, a cluster of chapels crowned by nine onion domes whose bright colours came later, in the seventeenth century.
Did you know? The State Historical Museum at the northern end holds around 4.5 million objects, making it one of Russia's largest museum collections.
04 Worker and Kolkhoz Woman
Russia ยท 8.5 km from Moscow55.828ยฐ N 37.647ยฐ E
Image by EvgeniT from Pixabay The engineering was novel. 5 mm skin was joined to its internal frame by spot welding instead of rivets. The group was assembled in the yard of a Moscow factory in a few months over a harsh winter, cut into 65 pieces for the train to Paris and reassembled there. The billowing scarf that seems to float behind the figures needed its own supporting truss.
Did you know? The pieces travelled to Paris in 28 railway wagons, and some had to be cut down on the way to pass through tunnels.
05 Palace Square
Russia ยท 0.2 km from Saint Petersburg59.939ยฐ N 30.315ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
W. Bulach ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 In the middle rises the Alexander Column, designed by Auguste de Montferrand and raised between 1830 and 1834: a single shaft of red granite 47.5 metres tall and weighing some 500 tons, standing on its base by its own weight without any fixings. Despite the century that separates palace and arch, the Neoclassical buildings match the Baroque palace in height and rhythm, and the result is one of the most coherent grand squares in Europe.
Did you know? In 1920 a mass re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace was staged here before about 100,000 spectators.
06 Leaning Tower of Nevyansk
Russia ยท 0.5 km from Nevyansk57.490ยฐ N 60.223ยฐ E
Ludvig14 ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 The structure is a massive square base, about 9 metres a side with walls up to 2 metres thick, topped by three octagonal tiers with balconies and a spire. The lean has a likely explanation: the tower stands near the old shore of the factory pond, and the ground settled unevenly once two thirds of the base had been built. The builders compensated by tilting the upper parts the other way, which gave the tower its curve. 85 metres.
Did you know? The walls taper dramatically with height, from about 1.8 metres thick at the base to roughly 30 centimetres at the top.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented โ the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Russia?
- On our list, Spasskaya Tower ranks first, followed by The Motherland Calls and Red Square.
- Why is Red Square called red?
- The name does not come from the colour of its bricks or from communism. The Old Russian word krasnaya meant beautiful as well as red, and the name was originally applied to the square in the sense of beautiful.
- How tall is The Motherland Calls?
- The statue in Volgograd is 85 metres tall from its base to the tip of the sword, which made it the tallest statue in the world when it was completed in 1967.
- How is the Alexander Column held in place?
- The column is a single monolith of red granite that stands on its pedestal without any fastening, held in place by its own weight of several hundred tonnes. It was erected in 1832 to designs by Auguste de Montferrand.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Russia?
- The list covers 6 squares, streets and monuments.