Senatskaya Tower, Moscow

Senatskaya Tower, or Senate Tower, is one of the intermediate towers in the eastern wall of the Moscow Kremlin, facing Red Square. Unlike the neighboring Spasskaya and Nikolskaya towers, it has no passage gate and was built purely for defensive purposes.

The Moscow Kremlin Museums date its construction more cautiously to the 1490s; unlike several nearby towers, its authorship is not firmly attributed to Pietro Antonio Solari in the museum’s official description. The tower has a square plan and rises to 34.3 meters. Its original lower section is crowned by machicolations and a parapet, while in the 1680s it received the four-sided stone tented roof, smaller upper structure, and weather vane that form its present silhouette. Inside the main body are three levels of vaulted rooms. The tower acquired its present name after architect Matvey Kazakov completed the Senate building behind it in 1787. The construction of Lenin’s Mausoleum in front of the Kremlin wall later made Senatskaya Tower an important part of the architectural composition seen from Red Square.

Although the tower itself is not a regular visitor attraction, its exterior provides a clear example of how the Kremlin’s late-medieval defensive architecture was modified with decorative additions in later centuries. Its position between the Senate building and the mausoleum also places several distinct periods of political and architectural history within a single view.