Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya metro line received 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 complicated due to the fact that the project has been subjected to changes and revisions many times already in the process. Sometimes it was politically motivated and determined by the aesthetic preferences of the Soviet rulers.
Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya metro line
Today it is the longest line of the Moscow metro. It stretched from east to northwest of Moscow and the first went beyond its borders. To say that the metro stations of the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line are very different from one another is to say very softly. On the same line of the metro are the unconditional architectural masterpieces of their era, such as “Ploshchad Revolyutsii”, “Arbatskaya”, “Kievskaya”, and simple functional platforms for boarding and boarding passengers. In this sense, the stations on the eastern and western parts of the line, which were built during the struggle against architectural excesses, were not lucky. This primarily concerns stations such as Kuntsevskaya and Izmailovskaya, where the struggle against excesses was so successful that there was no architecture at all.
But, of course, in all its splendor, the Arbat-Pokrovskaya metro line appears in its central part. But the war has made adjustments to the history of the construction of this branch. In the fall of 1941, a German bomb broke through the ceiling and exploded in a shallow tunnel between the Arbatskaya and Smolenskaya stations. This fact forced the country's top political leadership to abandon the construction of shallow lines, unable to fulfill the functions of bomb shelters in wartime. A parallel tunnel of deep occurrence was laid from the
Ploshchad Revolyutsii station in the Kievskaya direction. Thus, the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya metro line in this place went deep.
But the shallow-bed area was frozen and re-commissioned only in 1958 as part of a different one - the
Filyovskaya line. So in Moscow appeared the station of the same name - "Arbat" and "Smolensk" - on different metro lines. But to this day, two remain unfinished on the eastern direction of the Arbat-Pokrovskaya line - the Ilyinsky Gate and the Pokrovsky Gate. Under these stations, corresponding groundwork has been left underground, and in order to complete them, it is necessary, in addition to financial resources, the decision of the political leadership.
Legends of the Moscow metro. Arbat-Pokrovskaya line
There is a stable version that the change in the scheme of the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line and its departure to a depth was caused by the need to lay a secret subway tunnel from Kievskaya to 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 version about its possible use as an underground bunker of the General Staff located on Arbatskaya Square, directly above the station’s lobby.