History of Moscow

Human settlement on Moscow’s territory dates from the Stone Age, which began about 2.5 million years ago and lasted in this region until about 4000 bc.

By ad 1100 Moscow was a small town at the confluence of the Neglinnaia and Moscow rivers.

Records from 1147 show the city as a possession of Yuri Dolgoruki, prince of the Vladimir-Suzdal’ principality in Kievan Rus, the first significant East Slavic state.

Still a relatively minor city, Moscow survived the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, when all of Kievan Rus fell under the rule of the Tatar khanate, or empire, known as the Golden Horde.

Moscow prospered under the Moscow princes during Tatar rule, which ended in the late 14th century.

In its favored position at the intersection of trade routes, Moscow expanded in size and importance.

The capital of its own principality from the 14th century, it became the capital of a unified Russian state in the 15th century.

In 1589 it became the ecclesiastical capital of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In 1712 Russian emperor Peter the Great ordered that Russia’s seat of government be moved from Moscow to Saint Petersburg.

However, Moscow remained sufficiently important to be a target of conquest by French emperor Napoleon I.

In 1812 Napoleon’s troops defeated Russian forces at Borodino, near the outskirts of Moscow.

As French troops advanced, Muscovites evacuated the city, setting fire to many buildings as they left.

Napoleon and his troops occupied the largely deserted city for 39 days, until food shortages forced them out. The fire destroyed more than two-thirds of Moscow’s buildings.

In 1813 a commission was appointed to rebuild the city, and plans and designs executed over the next 30 years changed the face of Moscow dramatically.

Preceding the Russian Revolution of 1917, Moscow was the site of revolutionary activities against the imperial government, and, once the monarchy was overthrown, of further activities against the Provisional Government set up in its place.

During the October (or November, in the Western, or New Style, calendar) phase of the revolution, the Bolsheviks (radical socialists) succeeded in taking the Kremlin after a weeklong struggle.

This, along with a similar Bolshevik victory in Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then known), toppled the Provisional Government and allowed the Bolsheviks to establish a socialist regime.

In 1918 the Bolsheviks moved the seat of government to Moscow. When they founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922, the city officially became the Soviet capital.

During World War II (1939-1945) Moscow was the military headquarters of the Soviet government.

In October 1941 German Nazi troops approached the city, but they were unsuccessful in capturing it.

On December 6 the Soviet army launched a counterattack that was successful in forcing the Nazi troops to retreat from Moscow, renewing the spirit of the Soviet forces.

The city increased its production of weapons, enabling it to give more aid to the front, and new military units and hospitals were organized.

Industries that the Soviet government had relocated to more protected locations in the country’s interior gradually returned, and the economy began to recover.

Moscow’s postwar years were marked by increased migration into the city and steady urban growth.

In 1960 Moscow’s boundaries were expanded to the Outer Ring Road, more than doubling the city’s area.

In the 1980s the Zelenograd district outside this boundary was brought under the administrative control of the city government as well.

In 1991 Moscow was the scene of a coup attempt by Communist hard-liners opposed to the democratic reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Citizens took to the streets of Moscow to fight the attempted takeover.

Although the coup failed, Gorbachev resigned soon afterward, and the USSR was formally dissolved later that year.

Since then, the emergence of a market economy in Russia has produced an explosion of Western-style retailing, services, architecture, and lifestyles in Moscow.