Khitrovka Market: how a market square became a labour exchange

Khitrovsky Market began in the 1820s as a market square with rows of meat and vegetable stalls. In the second half of the 19th century, workers arriving in Moscow began to be hired here, while cheap lodging houses opened in neighbouring buildings. Its reputation as a Moscow slum grew out of this close connection between the search for work, accommodation for people with no fixed abode and the criminal underworld. Building records and contemporary accounts show how trade, hiring and room rentals changed over the decades.

The focus here is the square on Ivanovskaya Gorka and the adjoining properties, rather than the whole historic district of Kulishki. The history of Khitrovka begins long before the lodging houses and continues after their disappearance. To understand why a trading place became an informal labour exchange, we need to trace what happened on either side of the square: work crews were hired beneath a canopy, food was sold in the market rows, and places to sleep were rented out in the houses.

What was here before the market?

Before Khitrovsky Square was created, the site consisted of separate urban properties and a network of old lanes. The fire of 1812 destroyed the buildings on two plots later purchased by Khitrovo, but did not wipe out the entire district. Historical and cultural assessment reports describe neighbouring masonry houses and estates dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, which survived or were rebuilt in later centuries. The open market space and the houses surrounding it therefore have different histories. A 1767 plan by Major Gorikhvostov, a military engineer, reproduced by HSE University, marks the estate’s main masonry house and wooden service buildings within the property that included the future square. This house survives in an altered form on a neighbouring plot.

The new square was created among existing properties. Some houses faced it, while others stood in courtyards; owners rebuilt their buildings, rented out rooms and opened workshops. The uses of the old buildings changed gradually as trade and hiring drew people to the square.

The assessment report on the Lopukhin–Kiryakov estate sets out the sequence of alterations. The main masonry house took shape in the 18th century, and the side wings appeared around the turn of the 19th century. A third storey was added to the house in 1878, and under the Bunin family one of the wings was converted into overnight accommodation. The buildings around Khitrovsky Market thus included estate buildings that their owners adapted to new needs. According to a Moscow assessment report, Khitrovo incorporated two 17th-century buildings into the southern market rows. Even the market’s earliest buildings included older structures.

The district’s terrain helps us picture the approaches to the square. The assessment report notes the fall of the land on the slope of Ivanovskaya Gorka; Gilyarovsky conveyed the impression made by the lanes descending towards the market. But the slope cannot be cited as a cause of poverty or crime. It matters when interpreting the source in spatial terms: where the square itself lay, how people approached it and why the neighbouring buildings enclosed it so tightly.

How was Khitrovsky Square created?

After the fire of 1812, Major General Nikolai Zakharovich Khitrovo purchased two damaged properties for a new market. In 1824–1825, a square was laid out and paved on this land, and street lamps were installed; he donated the open space to the city. The Moscow Six-Member Duma paid for the paving. A covered two-storey building with shops and cellars for the meat and vegetable market was built along the southern side. After Khitrovo’s death in 1827, the market rows passed to other owners.

The historical and cultural assessment published by the Moscow Government, specifically links the creation of the square to the aftermath of the fire and describes its first market buildings. It also records the older estates around it. Before 1824, no such open space existed: its name and layout arose from a landowner’s decision, rather than as a continuation of an ancient market.

Sources give different years for the purchase of the fire-damaged plots: sections of the HSE University article mention 1822 and 1823, while the Moscow assessment report gives 1824. The report dates the laying out of the square to 1824–1825. The date of its development is therefore more reliable than the dates of individual transactions.

What was sold in the square before the labour exchange emerged?

Meat and vegetables were the main goods sold at the original market; the market rows stood along the southern side of the square. The open space remained accessible to residents, while buildings gradually filled its perimeter. According to historical and cultural assessment reports, the eastern rows appeared in 1837, the western rows in the 1860s and the northern rows in the 1880s. The shops did not close as soon as the labour exchange emerged.

In assessment report on the estate in Khitrovsky Lane the expert writes that Khitrovo died before completing the buildings, and that his heirs abandoned the original plan. In the expert’s view, the square ‘never became a proper market’. Another report lists market rows built in 1837, the 1860s and the 1880s. A lease record from 1895 provided for a pavilion selling kvass and mineral waters. Gilyarovsky described women traders and the sale of goods.

Goods continued to be traded in Khitrovka after informal hiring began there. HSE University cites a lease record from 1895: T. M. Vasilyev was granted five square sazhens in the south-western corner of the square for six years, for a pavilion selling kvass and mineral water. This small trading plot was established when the labour exchange was already operating: the market’s two functions coexisted.

Why did the square become a labour exchange?

After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, more people came to Moscow in search of work. Khitrovsky Square became one of the places where workers could meet employers without a formal institution, a set schedule or a permanent workplace. The assessment of the Moscow heritage site explicitly describes it as an open-air market for unskilled labour and links this change to the search for work after the reform.

The term ‘labour exchange’ here describes a practice rather than a modern organisation with a register of vacancies. People gathered in the square; a contractor or employer selected workers, agreed the terms of employment and took them off to work. For newcomers, a place known to both sides was important: even without an employer’s address, they could go somewhere workers were sought each morning. This regular meeting did more to sustain the square’s new function than any decree renaming the market.

Vladimir Gilyarovsky, in the ‘Khitrovka’ chapter of his book ‘Moscow and Muscovites’ described work crews arriving from the railway stations and contractors coming in the morning. People gathered beneath the canopy waiting to be hired; after midday, other market visitors occupied the space, including dealers in second-hand goods. His account captures the square’s later life, whereas the document recording its creation belongs to a different era. Comparing these sources reveals a change in function, rather than confirming every detail of the account as a statistical fact.

In Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik’s recollections of Khitrovka in the early 20th century, workers stand beneath an iron canopy from four in the morning until midday. This account by another contemporary clarifies the routine of the later market, but does not establish exactly when this hiring pattern began.

Historical and cultural documents give different dates for individual structures. The market rows on the western side are dated to the 1860s; one report dates the metal canopy in the square itself to the 1880s, while another says it appeared after informal hiring had begun. It is therefore impossible to claim that the labour exchange came into being on the day the canopy was erected. The practice of workers and employers meeting developed first; a more prominent structure was later provided for it.

How did hiring and everyday trade work?

Hiring was one part of the day in Khitrovsky Square. According to Gilyarovsky, the morning work crews left with contractors, and later goods were bought and sold beneath the canopy. This shift in activity shows why the old name ‘market’ did not disappear: alongside the search for work, small-scale trading continued, involving people of widely differing means.

Day labour was not confined to construction crews. In his description of Bunin’s house, Gilyarovsky mentioned day labourers who chopped firewood and cleared snow, women hired to wash floors, clean and do laundry, and tailors who altered clothes for sale at the market. His observations do not give the size of each group, but they challenge the familiar image of a uniform crowd of ‘Khitrovka residents’. Those living there included craftspeople working on commissions, people seeking one-off jobs and others who lived on alms.

Demand for cheap overnight accommodation was directly linked to the insecurity of earnings. Someone hired for just a day or a short job could not count on conventional long-term accommodation. A lodging house close to the morning hiring place therefore had practical value. The other side of this connection was dependence on irregular income: without a job, a person remained near the square, where they could try to find work again the next day.

This explanation rests on the proximity of these activities, recorded in documents, and on Gilyarovsky’s description of the daily routine. It does not mean that all lodging-house residents arrived after 1861, or that all unemployed people lived there permanently. Khitrovka brought together different people and changed over the decades; the market’s history cannot be reduced to a single social biography.

Why did lodging houses appear around the market?

Owners of neighbouring houses adapted some of their rooms for cheap overnight stays because there was steady demand around the square. Historical and cultural assessment reports list properties associated with lodging houses, furnished rooms, workshops and taverns. The square supplied a flow of people, and the surrounding houses turned that flow into income from short stays. This created a close connection between hiring, food sales and places to sleep.

One example is the Lopukhin–Kiryakov estate in Khitrovsky Lane, later a rental property owned by the Bunin family. The main house dates from the 18th century, while the southern wing appeared around the turn of the 19th century. From the final third of the 19th century into the early 20th century, some of the buildings were used as lodging houses; under the Bunin family, there were also workshops here. No separate ‘slum town’ was built: existing buildings were adapted to provide overnight accommodation.

The composer Alexander Scriabin was born on this same estate on 25 December 1871 (6 January 1872 in the Gregorian calendar). This verifiable fact from the assessment report illustrates particularly well how misleading it is to apply a single label to every house and every decade. One architectural history encompasses a noble family’s estate, the birth of a future musician, a rental property and lodging-house life. The square and its surroundings changed, but not every house changed at the same time or in the same way.

Elizaveta Yaroshenko’s house allows us to trace the changes year by year. According to the historical and cultural assessment report, in the 1850s a rental building containing accommodation, a tavern and rows of shops was erected at the corner of the square and Podkolokolny Lane. A design of 1866 brought together earlier buildings along the western perimeter; the new wing included an arched passage into the courtyard. This reveals a shift from individual commercial premises to a complex rental property, even before the famous lodging house appeared.

In 1888, Elizaveta Yaroshenko converted the building into cheap overnight lodgings. The architect Alexander Nikiforov designed two-storey courtyard galleries and toilets; some of the service extensions were completed by 1890. The building's historic core predates the market: masonry chambers dating from the 17th–18th centuries survive in the courtyard. The property later became associated with the Katorga tavern. The sequence of construction and alterations shows that the lodging-house way of life developed within an existing rental property, rather than being the original purpose of the entire block.

Gilyarovsky wrote about sleeping on communal wooden bunks, cramped conditions and the charge for a sleeping place. His vivid account conveys conditions in a particular setting at a later period, but the sums he quoted and his estimate of overnight guests cannot automatically be applied to the whole of the 19th century. To understand the causes, the underlying business model matters more: a small nightly fee generated income for owners when occupancy was high. In his study of Moscow housing historian Oleg Vasilik cites the findings of the commission tasked with improving sanitary conditions at Khitrov Market: in the lodging houses inspected, each person had roughly one-third of a cubic sazhen of air, against a sanitary standard of one cubic sazhen with adequate ventilation. This measurement relates to the premises inspected, rather than every building in the district. It gives the word ‘overcrowding’ a verifiable meaning and shows the cost of earning income from densely occupied premises.

Who lived in Khitrovka?

The inhabitants included day labourers, craftspeople, traders, beggars and people involved in criminal activity. What they shared was an address or the need to find work, rather than a common background or behaviour. Gilyarovsky's account mentions tailors from Bunin House, work crews arriving from elsewhere and gathering in the square, buyers of second-hand goods and patrons of various taverns. The sources allow us to identify these groups, but provide no grounds for declaring everyone who stayed overnight near the market a criminal.

Particularly revealing are the women Gilyarovsky mentioned in connection with washing floors, cleaning and laundry. Accounts of a ‘male’ labour exchange can easily obscure how these women earned their living, although their daily paid work formed part of the same economy. Those living beside the square were not only labourers waiting for a contractor in the morning. According to the reporter, Bunin House was also home to craftspeople who carried out commissions within the lodging-house community.

Tavern patrons also differed. According to a historical account by HSE University, Rumyantsev House contained Peresylny, frequented by beggars and horse dealers, and Sibir, where card players and buyers of stolen goods gathered. This describes the regulars at two establishments, rather than everyone living in the building or around the market.

Nor can we draw the opposite conclusion that this reputation was entirely invented by journalists. Historical and cultural assessments document a concentration of lodging houses, cheap taverns and criminal circles by the turn of the 20th century. The question is one of scale and timing: the documents describe a particular stage in the square's development, rather than a characteristic of the area dating back to its foundation.

How did the city try to improve conditions in Khitrovka?

The authorities and philanthropists sought to address poverty and unsanitary conditions, but these measures did not remove the demand for cheap overnight accommodation. One historical and cultural assessment report mentions the construction of lodging houses with charitable funds and explicitly notes that they were few in number compared with the continuing network of private lodging houses. This is an important limitation: individual acts of assistance did not change the economics of hiring day labourers and overcrowded properties.

The lodging house named after Flor Ermakov is a telling example. According to Galina Ulyanova's historical essay, the first building, with 1500 places, was built in 1909 in Kalanchyovka, near the three railway stations, and its management was entrusted to the municipal board for the relief of the poor of Khitrov Market. The lodging house stood outside Khitrovskaya Square itself. In this way, the city sought to provide workers arriving from elsewhere with an alternative place to stay, rather than confining its efforts to alterations to private buildings around the market. The connection with Khitrovka was institutional: the board was responsible for the district, but the new shelter was at a different address.

According to the figures cited by Galina Ulyanova, in 1911 the Ermakov lodging house accommodated an average of 1410–1450 guests a day and recorded 515 300 stays over the year. The annual total does not represent the number of distinct individuals: a single worker could stay there repeatedly. These figures reveal the scale of one shelter's operations; they do not establish the total number of people needing overnight accommodation in Khitrovka.

A special issue of the journal ‘Moscow Heritage’ states that by 1896 public dining rooms were operating at Khitrov Market and in Podkolokolny Lane. The publication links the emergence of these establishments to efforts to provide poorer city residents with inexpensive food of better quality. The presence of a dining room did not put an end to street food trading, nor does it prove that everyone in need received assistance. HSE University's historical account records further changes to the square itself: a metal pavilion housing a free public dining room was built here in 1912, followed by a masonry public lavatory in 1913. These dates show that the city continued adapting public space to people's everyday needs after the lodging-house community had become established.

The Orlov Clinic, which served local residents, occupied Nikolai Khitrovo's former house. Its proximity to the market reveals another aspect of the city's response: assistance reached people who worked, fell ill and stayed overnight nearby. The institution's existence does not mean that it solved the district's problems; its work complemented that of the dining rooms and lodging houses.

Police measures served a different purpose. Gilyarovsky described inspections of lodging houses and encounters between police constables and the market's inhabitants. These scenes cannot be taken as a comprehensive account of police work: the journalist selected characteristic and dramatic incidents. Yet comparison with a historical and cultural assessment report, which identifies criminal circles as part of Khitrovka in its later years, confirms that public order was a real concern. Reducing the city's entire policy to police raids would leave out the dining rooms, the clinic and attempts to improve lodging conditions.

How did the area acquire its reputation as Moscow's slums?

Khitrovka's reputation as a slum district arose from conditions at the market in its later years and well-known writings about it. Overcrowded lodging houses, precarious earnings, cheap taverns and criminal circles existed side by side. Vladimir Gilyarovsky described the buildings, stairways, establishments and their patrons in detail. His account brought this later Khitrovka vividly to readers' attention, but does not cover the square's entire history.

In ‘Moscow and Muscovites’, the names ‘Peresylny’, ‘Sibir’ and ‘Katorga’ appear as names for the taverns commonly used by their patrons. The reporter associated them with different social circles and described police inspections. Such details help us understand the language and internal geography of Khitrovka in its later years. At the same time, this is the work of an author who selects scenes and characters, constructs a dramatic narrative and recalls the past years later. It cannot be read as a population census.

Heritage documents provide a different basis for understanding the area. They establish the history of properties, extensions and the use of premises; one report explicitly notes the square's transformation into a labour exchange after the abolition of serfdom, while another lists the lodging houses and taverns around it. Read alongside Gilyarovsky's account, they produce a more precise picture: the literary testimony explains how the place was perceived and how it functioned in everyday life, while the assessment materials anchor the narrative to plots, dates and surviving buildings.

Even the word ‘slums’ needs limits. It describes some of the buildings and living conditions in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1820s, Khitrovskaya Square was a well-appointed trading space, while some neighbouring estates retained a different way of life. Work and crafts also persisted within the later lodging-house community. The familiar image of society's ‘lower depths’ highlights the harshest conditions and obscures the people trying to earn their daily bread.

Can all of Gilyarovsky's figures and scenes be trusted?

Gilyarovsky observed life in Khitrovka in its later years, but his account was neither a census nor a statistical report. He gave numbers of overnight guests and prices for different sleeping places, and recounted conversations with people he met. Without independent records, this information cannot be applied to every building and every decade of the market's existence. The account itself does not always make clear which period his overall estimate of overnight guests refers to.

There is another limit to this testimony. The reporter selected people and episodes that made his account compelling for readers: taverns with evocative names, encounters with the police and cramped lodging houses. Yet he also noticed day labourers, laundresses and tailors. If we read only the most disturbing scenes, the history of work that brought many people to the market disappears from Gilyarovsky's own text. It is therefore useful to cross-check the place names and buildings in his account against historical and cultural assessment reports.

The assessments are not a perfect ‘camera on the past’ either. Their main purpose is to establish the history and significance of a particular site, rather than to write a complete social history of the district. One report discusses the Bunin estate in detail, another Yaroshenko House, and a third the square itself. They may differ in their dating of individual structures or in their level of detail. It is more reliable to draw on the sequence of events they agree on and identify disputed details separately than to combine every statement into a supposedly infallible chronicle.

How did Khitrovka become part of theatre history?

Before staging Maxim Gorky's play ‘The Lower Depths’, actors from the Moscow Art Theatre visited Yaroshenko's lodging house in Khitrovka. A historical and cultural assessment report gives the address as property No. 11, Podkolokolny Lane, and states that copyists of theatrical parts lived in a courtyard building; this was where Gilyarovsky brought the actors.

The visit itself does not prove that Gorky based his characters on particular residents. The document confirms the address visited; the origins of the stage characters require separate research.

The Moscow Art Theatre's archive page dates the premiere of ‘The Lower Depths’ to 18 December 1902 and names Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky as the directors, and Viktor Simov as the designer. The theatre also identifies the cast: Ivan Moskvin played Luka, and Stanislavsky played Satin. These details help identify precisely the production for which the actors studied lodging-house life. They do not establish what the actors saw in Khitrovka as the documented source for every character in the play.

Beside the Katorga tavern were premises devoted to a very different daily activity: copying texts for the theatre. This proximity shows why a single evocative place name tells us little about an entire property. A city building could combine a tavern, cheap accommodation and the work of people connected with Moscow's cultural life. This mix is more interesting than a ready-made division between a ‘respectable city’ and its ‘dangerous lower depths’.

What does the history of individual buildings reveal about the district's transformation?

Around the market, older properties were gradually adapted for rental accommodation and short-term room lettings. The south wing of the Bunin estate stood before the square was laid out; in the 19th century, its premises were used for overnight accommodation and craft work. The Ivanov family became the owners at the end of the century, and in the early 20th century a four-storey rental building designed by the architect Edmund Yuditsky was erected towards the rear of the plot. One assessment report dates its construction to 1901, another to 1901–1903. The property's present appearance took shape over several periods.

The façades of the Yaroshenko House have a complex history. The expert report notes that, following major renovations in 1956, the arched shop openings facing the former square were converted into rectangular windows, and part of the gallery built in 1888 was reconstructed. The carriageway arches and vaulted rooms described in the documents belong to other phases. Such detail is more useful than simply referring to an ‘old house’: visible features need to be dated before they can be used to reconstruct the market’s layout.

Gilyarovsky called Kulakov’s property beside the square ‘Kulakovka’, and the house facing the square the ‘Iron’. The historical and cultural assessment report also lists these nicknames among the details of Khitrovka in its later years. They help make sense of the neighbourhood’s informal geography, but do not replace official addresses and plans. The name ‘Iron’ refers to the building’s shape and how it was perceived, rather than its residents’ occupations or the organisation of the labour exchange.

Comparing the properties reveals specific stages of change. At the Yaroshenko House, the conversion to overnight lodgings has a documented date: 1888. On the Bunins’ property, the old buildings combined living and working spaces, and a new rental apartment building was added later. The square connected them through trade and hiring, but their owners altered the buildings in different years and for different purposes.

What remains of the old market?

The market rows and lodging-house system have disappeared as a unified operation, but the surrounding buildings retain traces of different eras. Heritage protection documents identify the estate in Khitrovsky Lane, the Yaroshenko House with its earlier stone chambers, and the boundaries of the historic site ‘Khitrovka’. Their value does not depend on every façade looking as it did in Gilyarovsky’s account: many buildings were reconstructed, and their uses changed. These buildings allow historical documents to be compared with the present-day layout.

Individual market buildings have also been lost. The Moscow expert assessment report dates the demolition of the market rows built in 1837 on the eastern side of the square to the eve of the First World War and attributes it to the Karzinkin and Teleshov families, who wanted to create a garden. An account from HSE University states that the buildings on the eastern side had disappeared even before they bought the plot in 1912–1913; no archival evidence survives to show that their demolition scheme was carried out. The loss of the market rows is established, but these sources leave the exact year and who initiated it open to dispute. In 1929, a multi-storey residential building was erected on the site. The surviving perimeter of the square therefore does not match its nineteenth-century market buildings.

The fate of Kulakov’s property illustrates another limit to what has survived. According to HSE University’s account, most of the former estate buildings, including the mansion and courtyard buildings, were demolished in 1922. The ‘Iron House’ on the corner survived, but in 1925 it was extended upwards to four or five storeys; fragments of the old wing were incorporated into the reconstructed building. Its familiar nickname alone does not make today’s façade an accurate picture of the 1880s.

The site changed again during the Soviet period. According to the expert assessment report, a public garden was laid out in the square after the old market closed; a school was built here in the 1930s and later occupied by a technical college. The report dates the building’s demolition to 2009, while HSE University’s historical account gives 2009–2010. In 2014–2015, a public garden was once again laid out on the cleared square. The open space preserves the outline of the historic site, but its present appearance is the result of several redevelopments.

The history of Khitrovsky Market answers two distinct questions. The market square was established to sell food in Moscow after the great fire. The labour exchange emerged later, when workers arriving from elsewhere and employers began meeting here regularly, and neighbouring property owners adapted their buildings to meet the demand for cheap overnight accommodation. Its grim reputation relates chiefly to the later coexistence of day labour, extreme poverty and a criminal milieu. Distinguishing these stages restores Khitrovka’s history of people and economic decisions, rather than reducing it to a single urban legend.

You can explore the connections between Khitrovskaya Square and the neighbouring lanes on the ‘Notorious Haunts’ tour: the route leads from Revolution Square through the Tol kuchy Market area and Khokhlovka, ending in Khitrovskaya Square.

Sources

1. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report for 3/1 Khitrovsky Lane
2. Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report for Khitrovsky Lane
3. Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report for Podkolokolny, Pevchesky and Petropavlovsky Lanes
4. Vladimir Gilyarovsky. Moscow and Muscovites. Chapter ‘Khitrovka’
5. ‘Dens of Vice’ tour: description and itinerary
6. Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report for the Estate on Khitrovsky Lane
7. Moscow Heritage. Special issue on Moscow’s taverns and canteens, 2019
8. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report for Yaroshenko House, 2025
9. HSE University. Khitrovskaya Square: the history of the site
10. Oleg Vasilik. The Housing Question in Moscow Before the Revolution
11. Galina Ulyanova. The Ermakov Night Shelter
12. Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre. ‘The Lower Depths’ (1902)
13. HSE University. Krutitsy Metochion and the Taverns of Khitrovka
14. HSE University. The Flatiron House and Kulakov’s Property
15. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report on Pokrovsky Boulevard: Information on Khitrovsky Market
16. HSE University. The Lopukhin — Volkonsky — Kiryakov — Bunin Estate
17. HSE University. Yaroshenko House and the ‘Katorga’ Tavern
18. HSE University. The Karzinkin — Teleshov Property
19. A. N. Scriabin Memorial Museum. Key Dates in His Life and Work