Did you know that the Moscow Kremlin was once broken up into apartments?
After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the ancient fortress in the heart of the city was not deserted, but became something akin to a communal apartment complex. In 1918, leader of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin moved there from the nearby National Hotel, followed by the rest of the leaders of the new Soviet power.
By the end of 1920, more than 2,000 people had registered in the Moscow Kremlin. New tenants settled in all the buildings: they could be found in the Grand Kremlin, Poteshny and Teremny palaces, the Senate, in the wings at the Spassky Gate, the Taynitskaya Tower and the Ivan the Great Bell Tower. Lenin, his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and his younger sister, as well as his associates, including Joseph Stalin, Lev Trotsky and Mikhail Kalinin, were housed in the Cavalier Building. Next door, in the Grand Kremlin Palace, the revolutionaries and statesmen Yakov Sverdlov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, as well as Bolshevik poet and propagandist Demyan Bedny, settled down.
Apartments were occasionally redistributed among the tenants - and then they moved to a new place. For example, Stalin and his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva moved from the Cavalier House to the maid of honor room of the Grand Kremlin Palace and then to Poteshny Palace, to the rooms where famous revolutionary Inessa Armand had previously lived. Later, Stalin settled in a room in the Senate building - it was assigned to him until his death.
On some days, the Moscow Kremlin resembled public transportation during rush hour - local residents and petitioners and officials who had come to do their business were scurrying everywhere.
In the late 1920s, the number of Kremlin residents began to decrease - they started to move to separate apartments around the city. In the mid-1950s, the Kremlin ceased to be a closed territory: the period of Kremlin apartments was ending and the time of Kremlin museums was beginning. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov was the last to leave - he left his apartment in 1962.
