Alexander Garden

This guide to Alexander Garden in Moscow starts in the summer of 1918, when workers arrived at a four-year-old granite obelisk built to mark three hundred years of Romanov rule and set about erasing every tsar's name from it. It traces what went up in that stone's place under Lenin's own order, and follows the garden's habit of being rewritten again, from the river buried beneath its paths after 1812 to the eternal flame added in 1967. Look closely at the stone as you pass it, near where the garden meets the Kremlin wall.