Kievskaya

This guide to the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow starts with a missing face on the wall: a mosaic that once showed two Soviet leaders side by side, and no longer does. It traces the station's 1954 opening, the design competition that drew entries from across Ukraine, and the eighteen mosaic pylons tracing Ukrainian and Russian history from Cossack times onward. You'll hear how Soviet politics kept quietly reshaping the artwork long after the tiles were set. Best seen walking the platform end to end, pylon by pylon.