A Metro on Red Square: Nikolai Karazin's Drawing of a 1902 Project

This is how Red Square might have looked if Moscow had built a metro in the early 20th century to the design of the engineers Pyotr Balinsky and Yevgeny Knorre. Nikolai Karazin's watercolour shows a viaduct and the central metro station, neither of which ever appeared. Karazin (1842–1908) was a painter, graphic artist and writer, one of the most popular battle painters of his day, who won fame as a watercolourist.

Put forward in May 1902, the project was the most thoroughly worked out of the early Moscow metro proposals. It envisaged two networks of off-street railways and 74 elevated and underground stations; most of the track was to run on viaducts, and the grandest structure was to be a central station by the Kremlin.

The city did not accept the project: the viaducts would have cluttered Moscow's narrow streets, and members of the City Duma doubted that it had been properly worked out. The Moscow City Duma resolved: "Messrs Knorre and Balinsky are to be refused in their solicitations." The first metro line opened in Moscow only in 1935. The drawing is executed in watercolour, ink, pen and white on paper mounted on cardboard; the museum's collection also holds a second sheet by Karazin for the same project, showing the viaduct near the Moskvoretsky Bridge.