Moscow plans to link two of its main rail terminals under a vast glass canopy. Preservationists fear Yaroslavsky Station’s Soviet architecture could disappear in the process.

Reconstruction of Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station will begin in December 2026. A wave-shaped glass canopy will connect it to neighboring Leningradsky Station, allowing passengers to transfer between the two without going outdoors. Work will continue until 2028. The station’s appearance has changed many times over the years: the building designed by Fyodor Schechtel that Muscovites know today came much later. Architecture journalist Asya Zolnikova traces the station’s history and explains why preservation advocates are concerned about the upcoming reconstruction.

What’s happening?

Moscow plans to reconstruct Yaroslavsky Station, one of the city’s busiest transportation hubs. It handles more commuter rail passengers than most stations in Europe. On August 25, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said reconstruction would begin this year. It is scheduled to finish by the end of 2028.

What does the plan look like?

The design is still being developed, and few details are available. The most conspicuous change will be wave-shaped glass canopies covering 12,800 square meters (about 138,000 square feet). They will be built between the platforms of Yaroslavsky and neighboring Leningradsky Station. The canopies over the platforms themselves will also be updated.

Inside the building, plans call for new entrances and exits connecting to Komsomolskaya metro station, new utility systems, and additional passenger halls. Vladimir Yefimov, Moscow’s deputy mayor for urban development and construction, said every part of the design allows for growth in passenger numbers and trips. The station is already considered the country’s busiest for commuter rail services: 80,000 people use its commuter trains on a normal workday, and that number will exceed 100,000 by 2035.

Moscow’s urban development and construction authorities say the building will regain its “historic architectural appearance.” Officials have not specified which period they mean, however: Yaroslavsky Station has been rebuilt many times over the past century and a half.

How did the station come about? And what is it known for besides being busy?

The first station on the site was built in 1862. Both the station and the railway running from it were called Troitsky (from the Russian word for “Trinity”) because the tracks led to Sergiyev Posad and the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. Natalya Shashkova, a specialist in railway architecture and director of Moscow’s Shchusev Museum of Architecture, said that despite the route’s economic advantages, ideology played a central role in the project. The railways were mired in “financial misconduct,” prompting a proposal to improve their reputation with a line “built by Russian engineers, from Russia’s ancient capital to its principal shrine.”

The original plan was to build the station on 1st Meshchanskaya Street, along a direct route to the monastery. A plot in the Apothecary Garden was selected, but Moscow State University, which owned the garden, managed to keep the land. Construction was then moved to Kalanchevskaya Square (renamed Komsomolskaya Square in 1932 and also known as Three Stations Square), where Nikolayevsky Station, later renamed Leningradsky, already stood. Its neoclassical architecture was a model for Troitsky Station.

The station received its current name in 1870, when the tracks reached Yaroslavl. They were later extended to Arkhangelsk. Many branch lines were connected to the main railway, including routes to Ivanovo, Shuya, and Vologda.

At the time, the station and railway belonged to a joint-stock company headed by industrialist and arts patron Savva Mamontov. In the 1890s, he decided to rebuild and expand the station, but while construction was underway, he was accused of defrauding shareholders. The railway was placed under state management, and the authorities commissioned a new design. The resulting building, erected in 1902–1904 and designed by architect Fyodor Schechtel, is the one for which the station is best known.

By the end of Nicholas II’s reign, Moscow had become a major transportation hub for travel to the country’s east. During the Soviet period, Yaroslavsky Station came to be recognized as the Trans-Siberian Railway’s “kilometer zero.” A monument beside the tracks has marked this status since 2001. Trains to Vladivostok still depart from here. Alexander Solzhenitsyn also arrived at Yaroslavsky Station in July 1994, returning to his homeland along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

How much of Schechtel’s work remains today? And what survives from other architects?

Despite many reconstructions and repairs, much of Schechtel’s work remains at the station. He designed the main building facing Komsomolskaya Square, an example of the neo-Russian style, a national romantic strand of Russian Art Nouveau.

This explains its many references to Russia’s North: facade patterns reminiscent of Pomor ornamentation; images of pine branches, walruses, deer, and other animals at the bases of engaged columns; and cool, muted colors. Above the windows and entrances are majolica panels depicting landscapes and fortresses in Russia’s northern regions, while a frieze above the main entrance depicts pale lilac wild strawberry stems. The ceramics were produced at the Abramtsevo ceramics factory, also owned by the Mamontov family. The majolica panels were based on drawings by Schechtel and artist Konstantin Korovin and fired using a technique developed by Mikhail Vrubel and ceramicist Pyotr Vaulin.

Schechtel did not design the building from scratch; he worked with the existing structure. In the mid-19th century, when the station was called Troitsky, it was built to an austere neo-Renaissance design by Roman Kuzmin. Under Mamontov, the side wings were expanded, and a gallery with columns of labradorite, an iridescent rock, was added beside the platform. The architect behind that reconstruction was Lev Kekushev, another celebrated figure of Moscow Art Nouveau.

Schechtel retained the eastern wing and the platform colonnade but added new halls and transformed a building with a symmetrical floor plan into a series of varied architectural forms. This tripled the station’s size. Art historians compare it to merchants’ ornate terem houses, a “ship”-style church, or even the maw of a fantastical sea creature.

Beyond its general northern motifs, much of Yaroslavsky Station recalls Schechtel’s earlier projects. According to Moscow Art Nouveau scholar Natalya Nashchokina, the station’s “folk-print quality and grotesquerie” echo the Russian Empire’s pavilion at the Glasgow International Exhibition, which was also inspired by northern architecture. Schechtel worked on that project in 1901 and considered it his finest building. Yaroslavsky Station also clearly resembles his Levenson dacha in Peredelkino.

What was added after Schechtel?

During the Soviet period, the facade remained virtually unchanged apart from a few details: the coats of arms of the Russian Empire, Moscow, Arkhangelsk, and Yaroslavl were replaced with the hammer and sickle, and Soviet stars were added. In 1946–1947, Schechtel’s halls were partly rebuilt in the style of Stalinist neoclassicism to a design by Alexey Dushkin. The station was expanded again in 1965, when Mosgiprotrans architects Alexander Kulagin and Galina Matokhina designed glass-walled modernist buildings housing ticket offices and a waiting hall.

The station has undergone several renovations in the 21st century. In the early 2000s, it was restored using plans drawn up by Timur Bashkayev’s firm, reinstating some of Schechtel’s details that had been plastered over or altered during the Soviet period. The floor was also lowered by 15 centimeters (about six inches) to expose the bases of the late-19th-century columns and restore their original proportions. The hammer and sickle remained in the wrought-iron roof crest in place of the imperial double-headed eagle, however, as did the Soviet coat of arms above the entrance. These and other Soviet features were later included on a list of the building’s legally protected features, approved on May 26, 2020.

That explains the facades. What about the interior?

The station’s interior is much less consistent in style than its facades. Almost nothing recalls Kuzmin’s original building. Kekushev’s colonnaded arcade is still in place, but during Kulagin and Matokhina’s reconstruction in the 1960s, it became part of a new waiting hall with vaulted ceilings built between the station’s side wings.

Schechtel’s interiors survive only in part: the Stalin-era reconstruction changed them substantially. That was when Ivan Yefimov, a sculptor known for his animal subjects, added decorative plasterwork and openwork reliefs depicting hunting, fishing, and factories. Earlier, in the 1930s, the wooden paneling, benches, kiosks, light fixtures, and wrought-iron “Glasgow roses” had been removed. The roses are a motif associated with Scottish Art Nouveau and the architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Schechtel evidently saw these works during the Glasgow International Exhibition and later used the motif in several of his buildings. Some of these elements were recreated during restorations in the 2000s.

After the revolution, Konstantin Korovin’s paintings, including “Fishing in the Murmansk Sea,” “Northern Lights,” and “Walrus Hunting,” disappeared from the building. The artist brought them back from a trip sponsored by Mamontov, aiming to use the paintings to raise money to build railway lines to the North. They were first exhibited in the “Far North” pavilion at the 1896 industrial exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, after which most were hung in the station.

After the revolution, the paintings were taken down and stored in a utility room at the station itself. In the 1960s, art historian Mikhail Kiselyov found them badly damaged. They were then transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery’s storage facilities, where they remain today. Only some have been restored, and with great difficulty. Copies hung in the 2000s now occupy their places at the station.

What do people think of the latest reconstruction plan? Are the new canopies a good idea?

From a transportation standpoint, the reconstruction is necessary. Experts say doubling the waiting area would clearly make passengers more comfortable, while the canopies would let them move between trains, the metro, and other forms of transportation without going outdoors or getting their feet wet.

“Maybe they’ll even manage to introduce a single platform numbering system and stop tormenting passengers,” wrote urbanist Arkady Gershman. In his view, the best thing about the renderings is that they show no “security gizmos” — checkpoints with walk-through scanners and metal detectors (though that does not mean there won’t be any in practice). But images, Gershman said, are always “rendered from a flattering angle to ‘sell’ the idea.” Perhaps “it’ll all just come down to installing 101 screens and a million cameras.”

The plans for the historic parts of the station raise more questions. Museum of Architecture director Natalya Shashkova said the last major reconstruction, in 2005, sought to preserve every historical layer of the building. Now the Soviet additions are at risk: unlike Schechtel’s main station building, they have no heritage protection. She said:

A statement by Pavel Ivankin, president of the National Research Center for Transportation and Infrastructure, also indirectly points to the risks facing the modernist part of the building: he says the restoration will be modeled on the one at Leningradsky Station.

What happened at Leningradsky Station?

Leningradsky Station is Moscow’s oldest. It was built in 1849, and its latest reconstruction was completed in May 2026. Work lasted almost two years, beginning in August 2024. The facades and proportions survive from the original design by Konstantin Thon, the architect of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Grand Kremlin Palace. Everything else was added later, mostly during the Soviet period, including work by Dushkin, who, as at Yaroslavsky Station, renovated the interiors in the late 1940s.

In the 1970s, the building was expanded on the side facing the tracks to accommodate a waiting hall. The reconstruction followed a design by Lengiprotrans. This part of the building, like virtually everything apart from Thon’s facades and floor plans, was left off the list of protected features in 2020. As a result, the Soviet part of the building was substantially altered during the recent reconstruction: two mosaic panels depicting Moscow and St. Petersburg, covering more than 800 square meters (about 8,600 square feet), were added to the side walls. If the same approach is taken at Yaroslavsky Station, the interior of its modernist section could also be radically rebuilt.

Why did the square need three stations? Couldn’t they have built one big station?

No one ever planned a single station. In the Russian Empire, railways were built by different companies, both private and state-owned. Each served its own route and built its own terminal station.

Moscow’s three stations ended up beside one another because land was available. The city’s first railway connected it to St. Petersburg, and Thon designed the stations in both cities. The buildings are very similar: the main difference is the St. Petersburg station’s wider wings, while their central sections and train sheds were originally identical. Kalanchevskoye Field, then on Moscow’s outskirts, was chosen as the construction site.

Beside Nikolayevsky Station, later renamed Leningradsky, stood a customs house, freight warehouses, and other transportation infrastructure. Most importantly, railcars could be transferred from there to other routes. For these reasons, Yaroslavsky Station was built nearby first, and construction of Ryazansky Station, later renamed Kazansky, began in 1913. Schechtel also entered the competition to design that building, but Alexey Shchusev won. Komsomolskaya metro station on the Circle Line was later built to Shchusev’s design as well.

Such clusters are not unique. In imperial-era St. Petersburg, Baltiysky and Varshavsky stations stood side by side; the latter is no longer in operation and has been turned into a public space. In London, two masterpieces of Victorian architecture, King’s Cross and St. Pancras, stand right beside each other along Euston Road, with a third station, Euston, a few hundred meters (several hundred yards) away. Paris’s Gare de Lyon and Gare de Bercy are one block apart and share surrounding rail infrastructure.

Modern transportation complexes take a fundamentally different approach: they are much larger and more interconnected, designed as hubs linking different forms of transportation. All forms of transportation are brought together in a single megastructure, and passengers transfer through underground and covered passageways.