The Boulevard Ring extended from Prechistenskiye Gates Square to Yauzskiye Gates. The boulevards were laid out where the fortified walls of the old White City had been. Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich had given orders for the wall to be built as long ago as 1586, and over a period of seven years the architect Fyodor Kon girded the city with a new defensive boundary. The territory enclosed by the wall was given the name the White City, fromthe colour of the fortified walls.
Gates were built where the streets intersected the walls of the White City, and the gates took their name from the street which they served: Nikitskiye, Petrovskiye. Sretenskiye. The walls deteriorated over the years, and eventually Catherine the Great decreed that they should be pulled down. When the walls were taken down. the names remained. The stones of which the walls had been built were used in the construction of state buildings.
It was decreed that trees should be planted where the walls had been, and the first Moscow boulevard - Tverskoi - appeared in 1796. The Russian word bulvar came into the language either from the French boulevard or the German bolwerk. the latter meaning 'fortified wall'. It had already been a long-standing practice in European towns to lay out shady alleys on the sites of mediaeval fortified walls, and people loved to stroll along them. The word 'boulevard' was first rendered into Russian as gulvar. This was a play on the word gulyat which means 'stroll'. Later it was turned into bulvar.
The name Boulevard Ring is only a conventional description since the boulevards do not constitute a full circle. They are in fact a horseshoe whose ends reach the banks of the Moscow river. Under the Stalin Plan for Reconstruction it was intended to continue the boulevards to the Zamoskvorechye district, and thus close the circle, but this idea was never fulfilled.
The Boulevard Ring (Russian: Бульва́рное кольцо́, is a circular boulevard in the centre of Moscow, Russia. It is actually not a full ring, not locking itself as it never crosses the Moskva River. It begins next to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and ends at the Yauza River.
The Boulevard Ring consists of the following chain of boulevards and squares:
Straßen und Plätze des Stadtkerns umrahmen zahlreiche weitere Bau- und Geschichtsdenkmäler des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts. Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts wurde das Zentrum Moskaus mit einer neun Kilometer langen und 30 Türme zählenden Stadtmauer umgeben, die nicht erhalten blieb. An ihrer Stelle entstand der Boulevard-Ring.
Jenseits der Stadtmauer umzog die Stadt zusätzlich ein etwa 16 Kilometer langer Erdwall mit Palisaden und hölzernen Wehrtürmen. Den einstigen Verlauf des Wallgrabens markiert heute der Gartenring, von dem sternförmig die größten Straßen Moskaus abgehen. Der Komsomolskaja-Platz etwas außerhalb des Gartenringes stellt das Haupteisenbahntor der Hauptstadt dar und ist einer der belebtesten Orte Moskaus. Von den drei hier gelegenen Bahnhöfen laufen Eisenbahnstrecken nach unterschiedlichen Richtungen auseinander.
Das Bauensemble des Platzes ist beeindruckend. An seiner Schaffung nahmen berühmte Architekten teil. Konstantin Ton entwarf den 1851 fertiggestellten Nikolai-Bahnhof (heute Leningrader Bahnhof), Fjodor Schechtel den Jaroslawler Bahnhof von 1904, Alexei Wiktorowitsch Schtschussew den 1926 eröffneten Kasaner Bahnhof und das Klubgebäude und Leonid Poljakow das 28-geschossige Hotel „Leningradskaja“ von 1953.
