Moscow

• 1. Introduction

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  Moscow holds the second-highest number of billionaires of any city in the world, tied with Hong Kong. It stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, the northernmost and coldest megacity on Earth. More than 13 million people live within its limits, and over 21.5 million across its metropolitan area. The city covers 2511 square kilometers, making it the largest city by land area on the entire European continent. Its name was first written down in chronicles under the year 1147. Yet that first reference describes only a minor town on the western border of a principality. How does a marginal frontier settlement become the political, economic, and spiritual heart of an empire? Why did its rulers once move the capital away to a city on the Baltic, only to return it two centuries later? And how did a place known poetically as the White-Walled grow into a sprawl of more than 11,000 prefabricated apartment blocks? These are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Rise To Power

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  Daniel, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, became the first prince of Moscow when he was given the town as a hereditary land in 1263. By the time he died in 1303, the territory of his principality had almost tripled in size. It now encompassed the entire Moskva River and its tributaries, which made Moscow self-sufficient and gave it an excellent network for trade. Ivan I recovered the grand princely throne from Tver by proving himself a loyal servant of the Mongol khan. He collected tribute for the khan of the Golden Horde from dependent Russian princes, then used those funds to build up his own city. The metropolitan of the Russian Church found an ally in Ivan and moved his seat from Vladimir to Moscow. In 1326, the foundation of Moscow's first stone church, the Dormition Cathedral, was laid, and the metropolitan chose to be buried there. In 1380, Dmitry Donskoy led a united Russian army to victory over the Mongols at the Battle of Kulikovo, raising Moscow's prestige and confirming its rulers as the military leaders of the nation. By 1492, the Russian metropolitan called Moscow an imperial city for the first time. Under Ivan III, nearly all the Russian states were united with Moscow, and his defeat of the Tatars in 1480 traditionally marks the end of Tatar suzerainty.

• 3. Walls Of Stone

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  The limestone walls and towers of the Kremlin were built between 1366 and 1368, giving the stronghold its earliest masonry defenses. Ivan III went further, inviting architects from Renaissance Italy to rebuild the fortress as a worthy successor to Constantinople. Petrus Antonius Solarius designed the new Kremlin wall and its towers, and Marco Ruffo designed the new palace for the prince. The walls as they appear today are those of Solarius, completed in 1495. The Ivan the Great Bell Tower rose between 1505 and 1508, then was raised to its present height in 1600. The Italian architect Aleviz Fryazin arranged for a moat in front of the eastern wall between 1508 and 1516, connecting the Moskva and Neglinnaya rivers. This Alevizov moat ran 541 meters long, 36 meters wide, and between 9.5 and 13 meters deep, lined with limestone. In the 16th and 17th centuries three circular defenses were built around the growing city: Kitay-gorod, the White City, and the Earthen City. A craftsman named Fyodor Kon built new walls between 1584 and 1591, which held back a Crimean Tatar attack in 1591. From these ramparts the city earned the name Bielokamennaya, the White-Walled, a line now traced by the Garden Ring.

• 4. Fire And Siege

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  In 1571 the Crimean Tatars captured Moscow and burned everything except the Kremlin. The annals record that only 30,000 of 200,000 inhabitants survived. The Russian famine between 1601 and 1603 killed perhaps 100,000 people in the city. Between 1610 and 1612, troops of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth occupied Moscow, as their ruler Sigismund III tried to take the Russian throne. In 1612, prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin led Russian cities in a rising that besieged the Kremlin and expelled the occupiers. The following year the Zemsky Sobor elected Michael Romanov as tsar, beginning the Romanov dynasty. Plague returned again and again, killing upwards of 80 percent of the people in the outbreak between 1654 and 1656. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, the Muscovites were evacuated, and the great fire that followed was principally the effect of Russian sabotage. Napoleon's Grande Armee was forced to retreat and was nearly annihilated by the Russian winter. A Commission for the Construction of the City of Moscow was established in 1813 to rebuild, including a partial replanning of the center. Among the buildings constructed or reconstructed were the Grand Kremlin Palace, the Kremlin Armoury, the Moscow University, the Moscow Manege, and the Bolshoi Theatre.

• 5. Capital Lost And Regained

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  In 1712, Peter the Great moved his government to the newly built Saint Petersburg on the Baltic coast. Moscow lost its status as capital, and its population at first fell from 200,000 in the 17th century to 130,000 by 1750. After 1750 the population grew tenfold across the remaining duration of the Russian Empire, reaching 1.8 million by 1915. Vladimir Lenin, fearing invasion, moved the capital back to Moscow on the 12th of March 1918. The Kremlin once again became the seat of power. With the values imposed by communist ideology, the tradition of preserving cultural heritage was broken, and a new anti-religious campaign launched in 1929 saw the destruction of churches peak around 1932. In 1937 letters were written to the Central Committee proposing the city be renamed Stalindar or Stalinodar, but Stalin rejected the suggestion. Between October 1941 and January 1942, the German Army Group Centre was stopped at the outskirts of the city, then driven off in the Battle of Moscow. From the 20th of October the city was declared to be in a siege, and its remaining inhabitants built and manned antitank defenses under bombardment. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, Moscow remained the capital of the Russian Federation.

• 6. Stalin Reshapes The Skyline

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  Joseph Stalin's large-scale effort to modernize Moscow changed the city's appearance drastically. His plans included broad avenues, some over ten lanes wide, built at the expense of a great number of historical buildings and districts. Among the casualties of his demolitions was the Sukharev Tower, a longtime city landmark. The city's status as the capital of a deeply secular nation made religious buildings especially vulnerable, and the Kazan Cathedral and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior were both destroyed, then rebuilt during the 1990s. The Seven Sisters are perhaps the most recognizable contribution of the Stalinist period, seven massive skyscrapers scattered at about an equal distance from the Kremlin. Their imposing form was allegedly inspired by the Manhattan Municipal Building in New York City, and their style has been described as Stalinist Gothic. The Ostankino Tower, completed in 1967, was the highest free-standing land structure in the world at the time and today remains the world's seventy-second tallest. Earlier post-revolutionary years saw radical buildings too, including Lenin's Mausoleum by the constructivist architects of VKHUTEMAS. Vladimir Shukhov built his hyperboloid Shukhov Tower between 1919 and 1922 as a broadcasting transmission tower, and also designed the metal-and-glass vaults of the GUM department store on Red Square.

• 7. A City Of Greenery

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  Over 40 percent of Moscow's territory is covered by greenery, making it one of the greenest cities in the world. There are on average 27 square meters of parks per person, compared with 6 for Paris, 7.5 in London, and 8.6 in New York. Gorky Park, founded in 1928, runs along the Moskva river with estrades, children's attractions, dancing, and sports facilities. It borders the Neskuchny Garden, the oldest park in Moscow and a former imperial residence, whose Green Theater can hold up to 15 thousand people. Izmaylovsky Park, created in 1931, covers 15.34 square kilometers, six times the area of Central Park in New York. Losiny Ostrov National Park, the Elk Island National Park, spreads over more than 116 square kilometers and was Russia's first national park, wild enough that elk can be seen there. The Tsytsin Main Botanical Garden, founded in 1945, is the largest in Europe and contains more than 20 thousand species of plants. Moscow is unusual among major cities for paleontological monuments on its territory. In 1878 the paleontologist Hermann Trautschold discovered the left flipper of an ichthyosaur near the village of Mnevniki, and in 2014 the animal was named Undorosaurus trautscholdi after him.

• 8. The Sporting Capital

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  Moscow hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics, which were boycotted by the United States and other Western countries over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, with the yachting events held at Tallinn. The city is home to 63 stadiums, of which Luzhniki Stadium is the largest and the fourth biggest in Europe. Luzhniki hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics and later the 2018 FIFA World Cup, staging seven games in all, including the final. When Russia was selected to host that World Cup, the stadium gained almost 10,000 new seats, and two further stadiums were built: the Dynamo Stadium and the Spartak Stadium. Over 500 Olympic sports champions lived in the city by 2005. In football, FC Spartak Moscow has won more championship titles in the Russian Premier League than any other team, and PFC CSKA Moscow became the first Russian football team to win a UEFA title. Because Soviet sports organisations were highly centralized, the army team CSKA and the police team Dinamo were among the best-funded in the USSR. Moscow also bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, but when voting commenced on the 6th of July 2005 it was the first city eliminated, and the Games went to London.