Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line)

Interesting facts

Alexey Shchusev died in 1949, three years before the station opened, and received the Stalin Prize for it posthumously in 1951 together with Pavel Korin.

The final ceiling mosaic contains more than 300,000 pieces, covers 31.5 square metres and weighs over three tonnes.

The mosaics tracked Kremlin purges: Lavrenty Beria was erased in 1953, and Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich were removed in 1957.

Engineers wanted slender columns while Shchusev demanded 1.5-metre ones; the octagonal columns were finally built about 0.8 metres thick.

The vaulted ceiling, now famous for its yellow colour, was originally painted blue.

The hall lies about 37 metres below the square, and its floors are laid with crimson Kuznechnoye granite.

In 2009 the station handled more than 54 million passengers, reflecting its position beneath three main-line railway terminals.

In the early 1990s proposals to rename the station, including Three Stations, were considered and rejected.

Why it is worth it

Under the Moscow square where three main-line railway terminals meet, the Circle line has its grandest hall. Komsomolskaya on the Koltsevaya line opened on 30 January 1952 and is a late Stalinist palace in all but function: a nave 190 metres long, 11 metres wide and 9 metres high, wider and taller than any other column station on the network, lined with 68 octagonal columns faced in pale Uzbek marble. Overhead, a vaulted yellow ceiling is worked with Baroque stucco and hung with heavy, many-armed chandeliers, so that the trains seem to arrive in a ballroom rather than a station.

The design was Alexey Shchusev's, carried through to completion by a team that included Viktor Kokorin. The programme was explicitly patriotic: Shchusev conceived the hall as an illustration of a speech Stalin gave on 7 November 1941, in the first winter of the war, and the painter Pavel Korin answered it with eight large ceiling mosaics in smalt and semi-precious stone, set into the vault between the chandeliers: Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Minin and Pozharsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov, culminating in Soviet soldiers at the Reichstag. Between them smaller gilded panels show trophies and weapons.

The mosaics also record the politics that followed. Stalin appeared in some of the panels, and as his reputation fell after 1953 they were retouched more than once; in 1963 Korin himself redesigned the last of them, replacing Stalin with Lenin and an image of the Motherland. Above ground, the station's entrance pavilion faces Komsomolskaya Square with two six-column porticoes and links directly to the neighbouring rail terminals. The station won a Grand Prix at the Brussels World's Fair of 1958 and is protected as a cultural heritage monument, while remaining among the busiest on the network.

Getting there

Komsomolskaya is in central Moscow, on Komsomolskaya Square beside the Leningradsky, Yaroslavsky and Kazansky railway terminals, between Prospekt Mira and Kurskaya on the Circle line, with a transfer to the Komsomolskaya station of the Sokolnicheskaya line. Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO) is about 27 km away. The hall is an ordinary working station, open to anyone travelling on the metro.

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Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line)

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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