Nizhny Novgorod

• 1. Introduction

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  Nizhny Novgorod sits at the precise point where two of Russia's greatest rivers, the Volga and the Oka, merge into one. On the 4th of February 1221, Prince George II of Vladimir planted a wooden hillfort at that confluence, and what began as a modest eastern frontier outpost would grow into a city of over 1.2 million people. Today it stands as the sixth-largest city in Russia, 420 kilometres east of Moscow, carrying a history that stretches from Mongol occupation to Soviet industrialisation to a FIFA World Cup stadium built on the very spit where the rivers meet.

  For much of the 20th century, the city's name was erased from maps entirely. From 1932 to 1990, it was called Gorky, after the writer born there, and foreign visitors were banned outright. Street maps were not available for purchase until the mid-1970s. That secrecy points to something central about this place: Nizhny Novgorod has always been defined by outsiders trying to reach it, control it, or shut it away. How that tension shaped a city worth knowing is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name That Means Downstream

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  When Prince Yuri II of Vladimir chose the confluence of the Volga and Oka for his new settlement in 1221, he called it simply Novgorod, meaning Newtown. The problem was that another, older and far more famous Novgorod already existed to the west, and the two needed telling apart. The younger city came to be known as Novgorod of the Lower Lands, or Lower Newtown, because it lay downstream of older Russian cities like Moscow, Vladimir, and Murom.

  The word "lower" is a curiosity. Nizhny Novgorod actually sits at a higher altitude than Veliky Novgorod. The designation refers to its position downstream in the river system, not to any physical lowness of the terrain. It is a city whose very name encodes its place in a network of waterways that determined trade, war, and politics for centuries.

  The name Gorky, adopted in 1932, honoured the Marxist writer Maxim Gorky, who was born there in 1868 under his given name Alexey Maximovich Peshkov. He returned to the Soviet Union at the personal invitation of Joseph Stalin, and the city bore his name for 58 years before reclaiming its original identity in 1990. The residents' own demonym reflects the history: a male resident is a nizhegorodets, a female a nizhegorodka. Calling them Novgorodians is considered an error, since that term belongs exclusively to the people of Veliky Novgorod.

• 3. Fortress at the Edge of the World

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  For the first century and a half of its existence, the wooden fort at the confluence was the easternmost Russian settlement, a frontier post at the limit of the known world. Purgaz, leading Mordvin forces, made a major attempt to destroy it in April 1229, and was repulsed. Yuri II died on the 4th of March 1238 at the Battle of the Sit River, after which the Mongols moved in and occupied the fortress he had built.

  Nizhny Novgorod survived where many Russian towns did not. Along with Moscow and Tver, it escaped the full devastation of the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' because it was too minor to be worth destroying. Under the Golden Horde it grew instead, incorporated into the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality in 1264 with the Khan's agreement. Eighty-six years later, the seat of the powerful Suzdal Principality was moved there from Gorodets.

  Grand Duke Dmitry Konstantinovich, who ruled from 1323 to 1383, harboured ambitions of making the city a rival to Moscow. He raised a stone citadel and built several churches, and he patronised historians. One product of that patronage survives: the earliest extant manuscript of the Primary Chronicle, the Laurentian Codex, was written for him by a local monk named Laurentius in 1377. The Codex remains one of the foundational texts of Russian historical writing.

  After the city was absorbed into the Grand Principality of Moscow in 1392, the local princes took the name Shuysky and moved to Moscow, where they eventually briefly held the throne. The enormous red-brick Kremlin, one of the strongest and earliest preserved citadels in Russia, was then constructed between 1508 and 1511 under the supervision of Pietro Francesco. It proved its worth immediately, withstanding Tatar sieges in both 1520 and 1536.

• 4. Minin, Pozharsky, and the Time of Troubles

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  In 1612, a local merchant named Kuzma Minin raised a national militia in Nizhny Novgorod and placed it under the command of Prince Dmitry Pozharsky. The army they assembled marched on Moscow and expelled the Polish troops occupying the city, bringing the Time of Troubles to a close and establishing the Romanov dynasty that would rule Russia for the next three centuries.

  The legacy of that moment is woven into the physical fabric of the city. The main square in front of the Kremlin bears the names of Minin and Pozharsky, though residents call it simply Minin Square. Minin's remains are buried within the Kremlin walls. On the 21st of October 2005, an exact copy of the famous Red Square statue of the two men was placed in front of St John the Baptist Church, which tradition holds to be the site from which the call to arms was first proclaimed.

  The century that followed the liberation saw the city prosper as a commercial centre. The Stroganovs, the wealthiest merchant family in Russia, chose it as a base for their operations. A distinctive style of architecture and icon painting, now known as the Stroganov school, developed there at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Virgin's Nativity Church, completed in 1719, and the Church of Our Lady of Smolensk, built between 1694 and 1697, survive as examples of that nascent Baroque style.

• 5. The Fair That Fed an Empire

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  In 1817, the Makaryev Fair, described by contemporaries as one of the liveliest in the world, was transferred to Nizhny Novgorod. The move transformed the city overnight. Millions of visitors arrived annually, and by the mid-19th century Nizhny Novgorod had established itself as the trade capital of the Russian Empire. Local merchants conducted business not only with Moscow, Kazan, Yaroslavl, and Astrakhan, but with cities across Europe and Central Asia.

  The physical infrastructure built to house the fair was extraordinary in scale. Under the direction of Augustine de Betancourt, the largest guest complex in Europe was erected at public expense. Auguste de Montferrand designed the Cathedral of the Savior; three administrative buildings, four wooden Chinese-style structures, and 56 brick buildings containing thousands of shops, hotels, taverns, and a summer theatre were raised before 1822. For the first time in Europe, a sewerage system was provided for a fair complex. Subsequent construction phases added a mosque, an Armenian-Gregorian church, and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and eventually a Persian Caravanserai and the stone circus of the Nikitin brothers.

  The fair also drew inventors. At the All-Russia industrial and art exhibition held in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896, engineer Alexander Popov demonstrated the world's first radio receiver. At the same event, engineer Vladimir Shukhov unveiled the world's first hyperboloid tower and the first lattice shell-coverings. By the time the fair closed in 1929, and the economy turned sharply toward heavy industry, Nizhny Novgorod had spent over a century as the place where Russia met itself and the world.

• 6. Detroit on the Volga

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  Henry Ford's involvement in Nizhny Novgorod's industrialisation is one of the stranger chapters in the city's history. In the late 1920s, Ford sent engineers and mechanics to help build a large truck and tractor plant, known as GAZ, the Gorky Automobile Plant. Among the Americans Ford dispatched was a future labour leader, Walter Reuther. The plant earned the city the nickname "Russian Detroit."

  Sormovo Iron Works, the largest industrial enterprise of the earlier era, had already connected itself by private railway to the Moskovsky railway station in the Lower City. By the early 20th century the city was a first-rank industrial hub. The Soviet period accelerated that trajectory: the entire city was oriented around military-grade manufacturing and was sealed off from foreign visitors to protect the security of its research and production facilities.

  Intel later established a major software research and development centre in the city with more than 500 engineers, before suspending operations in 2022. The engineering sector today encompasses the Gorky Automobile Plant, the Krasnoye Sormovo shipyard that produces river vessels and submarines, the Sokol plant that manufactures planes and jets, and OKBM Afrikantov, which builds nuclear reactors. The auto industry alone accounts for 50% of the engineering sector's output, and a 128-metre open-work hyperboloid tower built by Vladimir Shukhov in 1929 on the bank of the Oka near Dzerzhinsk still stands as a monument to the industrial era's ambitions.

• 7. Exiles and Monuments

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  Nizhny Novgorod carries the imprint of people who did not choose to be there. The physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov was exiled to the city from 1980 to 1986 specifically to limit his contacts with foreigners. Mátyás Rákosi, the former Stalinist General Secretary of Hungary's communist party, died in exile there in 1971. Maxim Gorky himself had been a dissident against the Tsar before becoming the writer whose name the city bore for nearly six decades; his childhood home is preserved as a museum called the Kashirin House, named after his grandfather who owned the property.

  The city also preserves four monuments to those executed between 1918 and 1945. Two mark sites at the Pochainsky and Gendarmes Ravines where victims were killed and buried during the Russian Civil War. Two others mark the Bugrovskoe and Marina Roshcha cemeteries where those executed or who died in prison were interred. During World War II, from 1941 to 1943, the city then known as Gorky endured air raids and bombardments by Germany. The Germans targeted the city's industry because it was a major supplier of military equipment; according to the source, these became the most powerful attacks made against any city in the Soviet rear during the entire war.

  The Chkalov Staircase, constructed in the late 1940s by German prisoners of war forced to labour in Gorky, descends from Minin and Pozharsky Square to the Lower Volga embankment. Built in the form of a figure eight and consisting of 560 steps counted on both sides, it is the longest staircase in Russia. Its construction by prisoners of war adds an involuntary historical layer to a staircase that millions of visitors now climb for the view. In 1970, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded the city the Order of Lenin.

• 8. The City Since 1990

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  When the city reclaimed the name Nizhny Novgorod in 1990, it also shed its closed status and opened to the world for the first time in decades. The decades since have brought turbulence in local government: between 2010 and 2019, the city saw a mayor convicted and sentenced to 10 years in a strict regime colony with a fine of 460.8 million rubles, a city head who resigned amid corruption allegations after opposition blogger Alexei Navalny published a video featuring him, and a rapid succession of leaders in short tenures.

  The Nizhny Novgorod Stadium, built on the spit where the Volga and Oka meet and holding 44,899 people, hosted six matches of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Among them was the Uruguay-France quarter-final on the 6th of July 2018. Minin and Pozharsky Square hosted the FIFA Fan Fest on match days.

  The 800th anniversary of the city was celebrated on the 21st of August 2021. The climax was the city's 800th Anniversary Gala Show, at which Natalia Vodianova gave a speech and Vladimir Putin was in attendance. The Central Bank of Russia issued commemorative coins for the occasion. The art gallery, which holds more than 12,000 exhibits including works by Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Natalia Goncharova alongside canvases by Viktor Vasnetsov and Ilya Repin, remains one of the institutional anchors of a city that has spent eight centuries being simultaneously a fortress, a market, a closed military zone, and now a host of the world's largest sporting event.