MOSCOW

MOSCOW (Moskva). The etymology of Moskva and the question of whether the name was applied first to the city or to the river on which it is located both remain in dispute. Moscow is located in approximately the center of the East European plain on the Moscow River, a tributary of the Oka River, which flows into the Volga. Among distinguishing reasons for Moscow's rise to power over its neighbors in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are the following. First, being centrally located among East Slavic principalities, its trade routes stretched far in all directions. Second, due to its central location, Moscow was protected to some extent by distance from hostile neighbors to the west (Poland, Lithuania, Baltic Germans) and to the south and southeast (Tatars). Third, its political system was relatively stable, thanks to long-lived rulers and to the adoption of primogeniture in the royal dynasty, which made princely succession more predictable than in rival principalities where succession was frequently a matter of rivalry among brothers and sons. And, fourth, Moscow princes frequently proved able, shrewd, and adept in acquiring neighboring principalities and in making strategic alliances with or against various Tatar khanates.

As Moscow grew, the original fortified settlement, or gorod, became the central citadel of a city that expanded outward in roughly concentric circles, with radial streets emanating from the citadel. By the sixteenth century, the citadel was being called the Kremlin (from kreml, a word that apparently originally denoted an oaken stockade); its walls, faced with red brick, had been reconstructed by Italian engineers and encompassed the present territory of the Kremlin, some seventy acres. During the course of the sixteenth century, districts of the expanding city were encircled with their own protective walls: first Kitai Posad/Gorod, a commercial district east of the Kremlin and containing Red Square; then the Belyi (White) Gorod, the walls of which are marked by the current Ring Boulevard around the combined Kremlin and Kitai Gorod; and finally, the Zemlianoi Gorod, whose walls made a full circle around the city, crossing the Moscow River. The latter walls defined the official city limits until the eighteenth century and were located along the present Garden Ring Road.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a protective semicircle of six fortified monasteries was built up outside the city walls along the southern perimeter, guarding against the frequent incursions of Tatar forces from that direction. Those monasteries, now well within city limits, are, from west to east: Novodevichii, Donskoi, Daniilovskii, Simonov, Novospasskii, and Andronikov. Something of a city planning and masonry construction office (Prikaz kamennykh del) was founded in 1584, the principal mission of which was to encourage masonry construction instead of wood and to plan firebreak areas where construction was forbidden. Despite such efforts, 72 percent of Moscow buildings were still wooden as of 1811.

Trustworthy population statistics for old Moscow are lacking. Frequently cited estimates number 30,000–40,000 residents in the fourteenth century, 100,000 in the sixteenth century, 200,000 in the mid-seventeenth century, although all those estimates may be too high. Moscow's first systematic census, in 1701, counted 16,358 households, from which an estimated population of 200,000 residents has been proposed. The first official census of individuals was in 1784, when the population count was 217,000, a figure reduced by substantial losses during the plague of 1771. The next detailed census was in 1811, when the population of Moscow was measured at 262,000 (another "official" document says 270,000).

With the shift of government to St. Petersburg and the buildup of that city beginning in the early eighteenth century, Moscow was reduced to second place politically. The three-hundred-year rivalry between Moscow, the old capital symbolizing traditional Muscovite Russian culture, versus St. Petersburg, the new capital representing Russia's turn to western European cultural norms, was well underway in the eighteenth century. Under Empresses Elizabeth (ruled 1741–1762) and Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796), some western European baroque and classical architecture was introduced in Moscow—the beginnings of a partial "St. Petersburgization" of the former capital. Moscow was still honored ceremonially, in that emperors and empresses, up to and including Nicholas II, continued to travel to Moscow for a formal coronation in the Kremlin Dormition (Assumption) Cathedral. The relative neglect of Moscow, however, is exemplified by two grandiose projects in Moscow that Catherine started but then decided to abandon: a gigantic reconstruction of the Kremlin in Classical style, and a huge neo-Gothic palace at Tsaritsyno, on the outskirts of town.

See also Catherine II (Russia) ; Elizabeth (Russia) ; Orthodoxy, Russian ; Peter I (Russia) ; Russia ; St. Petersburg .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Colton, Timothy J. Moscow: Governing a Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

Gutkind, Erwin Anton. International History of City Development. Vol. 8, Urban Development in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria, Romania, and the U.S.S.R. New York, 1972.

Institut istorii, Akademiia nauk SSSR. Istoriia Moskvy. 6 vols. Moscow, 1952–1959.

Tikhomirov, Mikhail Nikolaevich. The Towns of Ancient Rus. Translated by Y. Sdobnikov. Moscow, 1959.

Jack Kollmann