Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

As you saw the other day, one side of the Kremlin looks over the Moscow River (Moskva Reka in Russian) and on the opposite side lays Alexander Gardens (Alexandrovsky Sad). Against the Kremlin walls in the gardens is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a war memorial dedicated to Russian soldiers killed in World War II.

The monument is decorated with a bronze sculpture of a laurel branch and a soldier's helmet laid upon a banner and in front of the monument burns the eternal flame from a 5 pointed star laid in a square. The flame lights up a bronze inscription which reads "Your name is unknown, your deed is immortal".

To the left of the tomb is a granite wall with the inscription "1941 - To Those Who Have Fallen For the Motherland - 1945" and to the right, leading along the Kremlin wall are red blocks inscribed with the names of the hero cities (Leningrad, Kiev, Stalingrad, Odessa, Sevastopol, Minsk, Kerch, Novorossiysk, Tula and Brest, Murmansk and Smolensk). In each block there is soil from the named city.

Two guards from the Kremlin Regiment guard the monument and there is a changing of the guard ceremony every hour when two new guards goose step past each of the red blocks from the right and then replace the current guards who then goose step back off to the right.