The Kremlin: Curating the Architecture of Power

High walls. Gold domes. Towers that pierce the Moscow sky like declarations. Inside: palaces of czars, cathedrals of saints, and chambers where Cold War phones once rang. From medieval fortress to modern icon, the Kremlin isn’t just the heart of Russia, it’s a monument to statecraft through stone. For curators, the Kremlin offers a profound prompt: How do we exhibit the past when the past still governs? How do we curate symbols too powerful to question?

Fortress as Story

“Kremlin” means citadel, a fortified city within a city. The Moscow Kremlin dates back to the 2nd millennium BCE in origins, and took its modern form in the 15th century, shaped by Italian Renaissance architects invited by Ivan III. Its walls, red brick and punctuated with 20 towers, are more than defenses, they are ideological borders.

Within them:

• Sacred cathedrals coexist with military might.

• Orthodox icons look down on Stalinist meeting rooms.

• Imperial coronations echo beside nuclear codes.

Museums must ask:

1. How do we exhibit architecture that doesn’t end at the walls?

2. Can we explore buildings as tools of persuasion, not just preservation?

3. What does it mean to walk inside a space that still rules its nation?

The Kremlin doesn’t just house power. It is power. The Kremlin contains several Orthodox cathedrals, including:

• Cathedral of the Annunciation

• Cathedral of the Archangel

• Dormition Cathedral, where Russian tsars were crowned

But these aren’t just religious buildings. They’re ritual theaters of the empire. Even in Soviet times, when religion was officially suppressed their symbolism persisted.

This challenges curators to:

1. Reframe sacred architecture as political infrastructure.

2. Exhibit how regimes appropriate holiness as heritage or legitimacy.

3. Present faith spaces are not just as devotional but as state-coded.

The Kremlin’s theology is inseparable from its strategy.

The Museum Inside the State

Parts of the Kremlin are open to the public, like the Armory Chamber, filled with imperial regalia, Fabergé eggs, coronation robes, and the Tsar Cannon. Other parts are inaccessible: used for government offices, presidential residences, and covert negotiations.

This duality poses curatorial questions:

1. Can a space be both museum and machine?

2. What are the ethics of exhibiting objects tied to active regimes?

3. How can we show imperial opulence without endorsing the systems that created it?

To exhibit within the Kremlin is to walk a tightrope between memory and propaganda.

Layered Sovereignty

The Kremlin is not one story, it’s many, often in conflict:

• Medieval piety

• Imperial splendor

• Bolshevik revolution

• Soviet power

• Post-Soviet nationalism

These histories aren’t sequenced, they’re stacked. The architecture doesn’t erase what came before; it absorbs it, coats it in new meanings, and points it toward the future.

Allow for overlapping narratives, not linear timelines. Show how materiality outlives ideology. Let the building tell the story of how it survived its own contradictions. The Kremlin isn’t a ruin or a relic. It’s a living contradiction in stone.

The Kremlin’s closed sections are part of its mystique. What happens behind those thick walls, past the armed guards and gilded halls, is the stuff of speculation, suspicion, and history-making. That secrecy is curated.

Museums might consider:

1. Exhibiting what isn’t shown, maps of restricted areas, stories from insiders, gaps in the record.

2. Using exhibition design to highlight opacity as narrative.

3. Framing institutional secrecy as a cultural artifact in itself.

Sometimes the most powerful artifact is what the institution refuses to reveal. The Kremlin is not a neutral site. It is charged, layered, contested and still active. Its challenge to museums is as psychological as it is physical: Can we present structures of power without becoming part of their performance? And perhaps, more radically: Can museums teach audiences to read architecture itself as ideology?