Red Square: Curating Power in Public

It’s vast. It’s solemn. It’s spectacular. Red Square lies like a giant theatrical set at the foot of the Kremlin, with onion domes, granite tombs, and Soviet ghosts embedded in every brick. Tourists pose. Soldiers parade. Protesters whisper. Presidents walk in choreographed silence. But beneath the stone lies a curatorial provocation - How do you exhibit a nation’s soul, when the soul is still in flux? And how do museums engage with public spaces that are already curated by governments, by history, by memory itself? Red Square isn’t a place. It’s a performance of power.

Not Red for Communism

Contrary to popular belief, “Red” in Red Square doesn't refer to communism. The word krasnaya originally meant “beautiful” in Old Russian. Its name predates the Soviet Union by centuries. This etymology is more than trivia, it reveals a cultural blind spot:

• We interpret spaces through the lens of the dominant story, even if it overwrites the truth.

• Names, like monuments, are curated narratives, not facts.

• History is retold, not just remembered.

Museums can learn:

1. To surface original meanings, not just reinforce inherited ones.

2. To expose how language molds perception.

3. To use wall text and interpretation to deprogram assumed history.

Red Square is not just red. It’s a palimpsest of misunderstood meanings.

A Stage Built for Empire

From coronations of tsars to Lenin’s funeral, from Stalinist military parades to Putin-era political theater, Red Square has long been a space where power is not just displayed but choreographed. It is bordered by:

1. The Kremlin (state power)

2. Saint Basil’s Cathedral (spiritual power)

3. GUM department store (commercial power)

4. Lenin’s Mausoleum (ideological power)

This spatial arrangement is a masterclass in civic curation:

• How architecture frames belief

• How placement equals narrative

• How public space can become a living museum of national identity

Museums should rethink:

1. Floorplans as spatial storytelling.

2. Building facades as interpreted texts.

3. Civic space as a curatorial act, not an accident.

Lenin’s Mausoleum, where the embalmed body of the Soviet leader still lies in state, is more than a tomb, it’s a biopolitical exhibit. Lit with red light, shielded by marble, and watched by guards, it embodies the aesthetic of permanence, the visual language of sanctity, and blurring of sacred and state.

For museums, this challenges ethical lines:

• What are the limits of displaying the human body as an artifact?

• Can reverence and critique coexist in the same exhibition?

• Is it possible to curate ideology, without replicating its spectacle?

Lenin’s Mausoleum is a time capsule of belief. But it’s also a living question in stone and silence. Red Square feels frozen, but it isn’t. It evolves constantly. In 1990, it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, it was recontextualized by global protest and politicized tourism and in 2025, it is both a destination and a disputed symbol.

This duality offers insight:

No site is post-historical. Every monument is part of a living argument. The role of curation is not just to preserve but to contextualize in real time. To walk Red Square is to step into a space defined by contradiction: where holy places sit beside tombs, and luxury boutiques rise beside revolutionary graves. It is a past both celebrated and censored, a mosaic of memory that refuses to resolve into a single narrative. Museums must confront this tension. Can we design spaces that honor discomfort, frame ambiguity without fear, and treat contradiction not as a flaw, but as a defining feature? Red Square does not shy away from these complexities. Instead, it stands unapologetically within them. In every sense, it is a museum without walls: a site of memory, a display of authority, a container of contradiction. It needs no ticket booth because what it truly exhibits is us: our assumptions, our histories, and our ideals. For museum professionals, Red Square asks not only what to display but how to let space itself do the talking.