History History

Although human presence in the region dates back to the Paleolithic era, when the retreat of the glaciers allowed people to settle on the plains, Moscow historiography only begins with the Slavic migrations between the 6th and 9th centuries. Their tribes came from the south and north-east and assimilated with the indigenous Finno-Ugric peoples.

In 862, the "Appel des Varègues" was launched. The Viking Prince Riurk took power in Novgorod, founded the first Slavic state and the Riurikid dynasty. In 880, Oleg the Wise conquered Kiev and made it his capital. The following centuries were marked by the conversion of the Slavs to orthodoxy, but also by succession disputes and foreign interventions which weakened and fragmented the Rus' into rival principalities. In 1147, Prince Yuri Dolgoruki (whose statue is enthroned on the Tverskaya River) invited another prince to stay in Moscow: this is the first mention of the town in written sources. Politically disunited, the Slavs bowed to the Tatar-Mongolian invasions beginning in 1223 and became dependent on the Golden Horde for 250 years (1236-1480). In 1240, Kiev was wiped off the map.

A migratory movement caused by the invasion moves the centre of the Slavic world northwards. In 1263, Daniil Aleksandrovich inherited a newly founded principality, Moscovia. His successors will distinguish themselves by an intelligent policy of alliance with the Horde and support of the Church. His son, Ivan I Kalita transfers the capital of Moscow to Moscow and installs the Orthodox Metropolitan Peter there. He acquires from the Khan of the Golden Horde the title of Grand Prince and the right to pass it on to his eldest son. The Metropolitan prophesies that if Ivan builds a church in honour of the Assumption, Moscow will gather all Russian lands around it. This was done in 1326, and the church became the first stone building in Moscow. Thus, during the reign of Ivan III, between 1462 and 1505, a new state was formed, heir to the glory of the Eastern Roman Empire and independent of Mongolian rule.

In 1547, Ivan IV the Terrible became the first czar of all the Russias. By subjugating the Tatars of the Volga around Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552, he laid the foundations for a multi-ethnic Russian empire. Under his reign, Moscow is completely rebuilt after its fire in 1571 and receives its white stone Kremlin and Red Square.

After the death of his son Fedor I, the Riurikid dynasty died out. For 9 years, his brother-in-law Boris Godounov, 4 false Dimitri - impostors posing as the third deceased son of Ivan IV the Terrible -, a cabal of 7 boyars, a Polish occupation and a popular uprising led by Minin and Pojarski (whose statue is enthroned on Red Square) succeeded one another in Moscow. Finally, in 1613, the zemski sobor (Assembly of nobles created by Ivan IV), chose Tsar Mikhail Romanov who founded the second dynasty.

Moscow is abandoned in favour of the imperial capital Petrograd.

Seeing Russia as too Asian, Peter the Great embarked on an incognito trip to Europe and triggered a major reform of the empire that went so far as to forbid Russian nobles to wear beards or their traditional dress. Obsessed with the navy, he waged war on Sweden for 12 years to gain access to the Baltic Sea and had St Petersburg (Petrograd at the time) built there from 1703, giving it all the characteristics of a European capital.

The court and the administration are leaving Moscow for good. It then became the symbol of traditional Russia, the seat of the patriarchate and guardian of the ritual of imperial succession. Every emperor is bound to Moscow by his coronation, for better or for worse, such as the tragedy of the Khodynka stampede in May 1896 at the coronation of the last emperor Nicholas II, which resulted in the death of nearly 1,300 people. The city is also a centre of art and science: it was in Moscow that the first university was founded in 1755 (today's MSU).

Catherine II, the Empress of the Enlightenment, a conqueror and reformer with an exciting love life, took the time to visit 200 Russian towns and villages to impose her general plans. The cities of the Golden Ring and, to a lesser extent, Moscow, inherited their present scheme.

After the capture of Moscow by Napoleon following the decisive battle of Borodino, General Kutuzov resolved to sacrifice the city. On the night of December 14, 1812, fires were started by Russian patriots in the occupied city, destroying it 9/10ths of the time^.

Alexander II "the Liberator" shakes up traditions by putting an end to the system of serfdom and embarking on liberal reforms. In 1881, Alexander II succumbed to a bomb thrown into his coach by the Narodnaya Volia (The Will of the People) organization. After this assassination, there is no more room for liberal ideas and the Empire follows the unofficial slogan "autocracy, orthodoxy, nationalism". The last of the Romanovs, Nicholas II, ignored the country's need for reform, which culminated in the episode of Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905 in St. Petersburg. The revolution of 1905 forced him to install a constitutional empire, but the critical situation on the Russian front during the First World War provoked a^second revolution in February 1917. This time he was deposed. A provisional government, unofficially doubled by the Soviets (People's Assemblies), is established before being overthrown in turn by a Bolshevik coup led by Vladimir Lenin during the night of October 25: this is the^3rd and last Russian revolution.

Lenin transferred the capital to the city where the Soviets were most established, Moscow in 1917. The Bolsheviks would then concentrate on ending the First World War by signing the humiliating Brest-Litovsk peace treaty so that they could concentrate on their own war at home against "the Whites". This was the period of Trotsky's war communism, Red Terror, mass emigration and bloody fratricides.

The founding of the Union of Soviet and Socialist Republics in 1922 is full of paradoxes. While it aspired to a communist ideal, it was founded in parallel with Lenin's New Economic Policy (1921-1923), which allowed the limited existence of property rights and a private sector to rebuild the country. Ill, Lenin was ousted from power in 1923, and the succession dispute began between Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin is the great figure of Russian socialism. This professional revolutionary spent most of his life in exile, where he prepared his so-called Marxist-Leninist doctrine. After the success of the revolution that he was calling for, he finally took little advantage of it. Most of his legacy is posthumous: he appears on all Soviet iconography, the metro is dedicated to him and his mausoleum is enthroned on Red Square (and still frightens the Muscovites).

The 1930s were a great turning point towards socialism in a single country, towards a totalitarian regime and towards a cult of personality. In order to establish his power, Stalin gives carte blanche to his new political police, triggering the "Great Purge", the symbol of which is the Moscow trials: the real or imaginary opponents of the leader are killed or sent to the gulags. Stalin reinforces the contradictions of the USSR with his cult of the Soviet family, which causes the return of a ban on abortion and the criminalization of homosexuality then abolished by the Revolution. To quote the father of the peoples at that time: "Every time Russia was late, we were beaten. "He decided to make the city a showcase for communism. This is how the ring of exhibition parks with the Moscow Botanical Garden, the Gorky Park of Culture, the gigantic VDNKh, etc. appeared. Vertically, we note the erection of the "Seven Sisters": a group of monumental skyscrapers. Finally, the Moscow metro and two motorways were created. Soviet urban planning attacks the historic centre: we find the Congress Palace and the famous Building 14 which housed the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (destroyed in 2014) within the walls of the Kremlin fortress.

The Third Reich launches its operation "Barbarossa", a surprise attack by the USSR, despite the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The USSR was unprepared and millions of people died in order to hold back the Nazis. Operations "Typhoon" and "Wotan" attempted to take the capital and Soviet resistance was desperately organized around Marshal Zhukov. The siege takes place less than 50 km from the city, which will suffer under the fire of bombardments and shortages. A monument in the town of Khimki marks their maximum advance 26 km from the Kremlin. The day after the peace treaty, Moscow becomes the capital of the Eastern bloc during the Cold War.

Having nobly participated in the nuclear arms race, with its succession of crises (Berlin, Cuba, and Budapest), Moscow is running out of steam in the face of shortages of commodities and food, poor housing and the contradictions of its regime. During the Stalinist era, Nikita Khrushchev (the architect of the thaw with the Western bloc, of destalinization and space conquest) is responsible for the party section in Moscow. In particular, he supervised part of the work on the metro and was responsible for improving the living conditions of the city's inhabitants by fighting corruption. Once in power, strengthened by his experience, he launched his great housing policy: these prefabricated buildings that can be found everywhere in the former USSR. The end of the Soviet era for the Muscovites is that of a succession of meaningless names and an impression of stagnation, exacerbated by the failures in Afghanistan. The collapse of the USSR will still come at the price of shock and unrest in the city.

On 8 December 1991, Yeltsin and the Presidents of Ukraine and Belarus dissolved the USSR. After the fall of the Eastern bloc, history does not stop for the Muscovites, on the contrary it is a moment of upheaval with the opening to the market economy at the price of the great banditry, Tcherkizone, and the lokhotrons (financial pyramids).

Boris Yeltsin became popular in Moscow after he took up the cause of Moscow workers by denouncing the poor quality of transport and the endless queues to get to shops and amenities. He was elected president of the RSFS in 1990 and began opposing Soviet Union leader Michael Gorbachev. He thwarted a communist putsch in August 1991 in the city. However, he did not manage to keep the trust of the Muscovites because of the failure of the war in Chechnya. On the occasion of his 1999 New Year's greetings, which instantly became mythical, Yeltsin resigned and proposed his protégé Vladimir Putin as his successor.

Under Vladimir Putin, who came to power in 2000 as a KGB man, Moscow is the kingdom of its mayor Yuri Luzhkov. He was an extremely powerful politician surrounded by a court of loyalists, who received the majority of public contracts. His courtiers (the architect Kuzmin, the singer Gazmanov and the sculptor Tsereteli) turned Moscow into a burlesque. He was thanked by Medvedev in 2010.

The current mayor is extremely proactive. He is sometimes compared to Baron Haussmann: renovations in downtown Moscow have cost hundreds of millions of euros since 2015 and his Greater Moscow policy inspired by Greater Paris has already profoundly transformed the city and its services. This stability is called into question by the growing discontent of the "Moscowbourgeois", a pejorative name given by the militants of Russia united at the heart of the Russian opposition. It denounces the lack of democracy, corruption and violence of the authorities. The two greatest moments of the Moscow protest were in 2012-2013 (on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue) at the time of Putin's return to power and in 2019 under the cumulative effect of the disputed pension reform, the restriction of Internet access, the Golunov affair and the opaque re-election of the current mayor.