A closer look

Red Square in Moscow has absolutely nothing to do with the communist political party or the color of the surrounding brick buildings, as the name actually derives from an old Russian word that originally meant beautiful; the meaning of the word simply evolved over the centuries to mean the color red, transforming a plaza once known as Beautiful Square into something that sounds aggressively militant, perfectly aligning with the gritty, authoritarian aesthetic of the Cold War and confusing millions of foreign tourists who assume the name was a heavy-handed nod to the Soviet Union