Once Triumphal Square, it was renamed Mayakovsky Square in 1934. In the spring of 1958, a statue of the poet Mayakovsky was unveiled in Mayakovsky Square. The official ceremony included a poetry reading presented by Komsomol organizations. A kind of spontaneous combustion turned the event into an open reading that went onto into late in the night.

The square is also famous for the Variety Theater - the Moscow Music Hall of the 1920's, located in the present day Theater of Satire.The theater was built as a circular circus building in 1911 by the architect B. M. Nilus for the first Russian circus of the Nikitin brothers, competing with the old circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard. Bulgakov managed to visit the Nikitin circus before it closed in the early 20s, and it is described in his stories "Fatal Eggs" and "Heart of a Dog."