Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya metro line. From east to north-west

The Arbat-Pokrovskaya metro line accepted the first passengers in the spring of 1938. At that time it was the second line of the Moscow metro. The history of its construction is very difficult due to the fact that the project has been subjected to changes and rework many times already in the process of work. Sometimes it was politically motivated and determined by the aesthetic preferences of the Soviet rulers.

Arbat-Pokrovskaya metro line

Today it is the longest line of the Moscow Metro. It stretched from the east to the north-west of Moscow and the first went beyond it. To say that the metro stations of the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line are very different from one to the other, is to put it very gently. On one line of the underground there are both unconditional architectural masterpieces of their epoch, such as "Revolution Square", "Arbatskaya", "Kievskaya", and simple functional platforms for boarding and boarding passengers. In this respect, the stations on the eastern and western parts of the line, which were built during the struggle against architectural excesses, were unlucky. First of all it concerns such stations as "Kuntsevskaya" and "Izmaylovskaya", where the fight against excesses was so successful that they did not have any architecture at all. But, of course, in all its splendor, the Arbat-Pokrovskaya metro line appears in its central part. But the history of the construction of this branch was corrected by war. In the fall of 1941, a German bomb struck the ceiling and exploded in a tunnel of shallow ground between the Arbatskaya and Smolenskaya stations. This fact forced the country's top political leadership to abandon the construction of small-scale lines, unable to perform bomb shelter functions in time of war. From the station "Revolution Square" in the direction of "Kiev" was laid parallel tunnel of deep occurrence. Thus, the Arbat-Pokrovskaya metro line in this place went deep. And the site of shallow occurrence was frozen and re-entered into operation only in 1958 as part of another line, the Filevskaya line. So in Moscow appeared the same station - "Arbat" and "Smolensk" - on different metro lines. But to this day two are still unconfined in the eastern direction of the Arbat-Pokrovskaya line - the Ilyinsky Gates and the Pokrovsky Gates. Under these stations, the corresponding reserves are left under the ground, and in order to complete them, it is necessary, in addition to financial means, to decide the political leadership.

Legends of the Moscow metro. Arbat-Pokrovskaya line

There is a steady version that the change in the scheme of the Arbat-Pokrovskaya line and its departure to depth was caused by the need to lay a secret metro tunnel from the Kievskaya to the Stalin's dacha in Kuntsevo. Thus, he allegedly intended to get to the Kremlin. But to verify the reliability of this information is not possible. However, the inadequately large dimensions of the Arbatskaya station make it possible to recognize the likely version of the possibility of using it as an underground bunker of the General Staff located on Arbat Square, directly above the station's lobby.