Smolensk

• 1. Introduction

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  Smolensk sits on the Dnieper River, 360 kilometers west-southwest of Moscow, and for more than a thousand years it has stood at the hinge between civilizations. Its first recorded mention dates to 863 AD, two years before the founding of Kievan Rus'. Varangian chieftains heading south toward Kiev looked at Smolensk and turned back, deciding its size and population were not worth the fight. That reputation for consequence has never quite left. The questions worth following here are deceptively simple: how does a city survive being destroyed and repossessed again and again, and what does that survival cost?

• 2. The Name and the River

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  Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, who reigned from 913 to 959, recorded the city's name as Miliniska. That spelling reflects a world where Smolensk was already known far beyond its own borders. The city's actual name traces back to the Smolnya River, and from there the story splits into two plausible directions. One points to the old Slavic word smol', meaning black soil, which may have darkened the river's waters. The other points to smola, the Russian word for resin, tar, or pitch, materials that pine trees in the region produced in abundance. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, writing around 950 in De Administrando Imperio, recorded why that second meaning stuck. Merchants traveling the trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks sailed up the Western Dvina River from the Baltic as far as they could, then dragged their boats overland to the upper Dnieper. Smolensk was the place where they repaired the damage, sealing hull leaks with tar. The city's name, in other words, is a receipt from a thousand years of commerce.

• 3. Crossroads and Contestation

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  The Principality of Smolensk was founded in 1054, and within a century and a half it had become one of the strongest principalities in Eastern Europe. Smolensk princes frequently controlled the Kievan throne during the 12th century. The veche, a civic assembly with roots in the earliest days of the city's history, grew powerful enough that princes had to heed its will; open conflict between them erupted several times in the 12th and 13th centuries. Two churches built in that era still convey the ambition of the period: the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, dated to 1146, and the church called Svirskaya, completed in 1197, which contemporaries admired as the most beautiful structure east of Kiev.

  The Mongols bypassed Smolensk in 1240, but the city was not spared the geopolitical pressure that followed. It became a pawn between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Principality of Moscow. The last sovereign ruler of Smolensk was Yury of Smolensk, and during his reign Vytautas the Great of Lithuania took the city three times: in 1395, in 1404, and again in 1408. Lithuanian control drew away some of Smolensk's leading families; boyars such as the Sapiehas moved to Vilnius, while descendants of the ruling princes, including ancestors of the Mussorgskys and the Kropotkins, fled to Moscow.

  Three Lithuanian Smolensk regiments fought at the 1410 Battle of Grunwald against the Teutonic Knights. Vasily III of Russia retook the city in 1514, and to mark the victory he founded the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow, dedicating it to the icon of Our Lady of Smolensk. The loss of the city to Moscow inspired Stanczyk, one of Polish painter Jan Matejko's most celebrated works.

• 4. The Kremlin and the Siege

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  Boris Godunov made fortifying Smolensk a personal priority, aiming to stop future Polish-Lithuanian incursions. The stone kremlin built between 1597 and 1602, under the supervision of architect Fyodor Kon, became the largest kremlin in Russia. Its thick walls and numerous watchtowers were the most formidable defensive works of the age. They were not enough. In 1611, after a twenty-month siege during the Time of Troubles and the Dimitriads, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth took the fortress. Muscovy, weakened, ceded Smolensk in the Truce of Deulino. The city was granted Magdeburg rights that same year and served as the seat of Smolensk Voivodeship for the next forty-three years.

  Russia launched the so-called Smolensk War in 1632 to recover the city, but a defeat at the hands of King Wladislaw IV left it in Polish-Lithuanian hands. The conflict resumed in 1654 when the Commonwealth was destabilized by the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Swedish invasion. After another siege, on the 23rd of September 1654, Smolensk returned to Russian control. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth formally renounced its claims in the 1667 Truce of Andrusovo. The Kremlin built by Fyodor Kon under Boris Godunov still stands today.

• 5. Napoleon and the Katyn Forest

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  In August 1812, two of the largest armies ever assembled met at Smolensk. Leo Tolstoy wrote about the hard-fought battle in War and Peace, in Book Three, Part Two, Chapter Four. Napoleon entered the city after fighting that left an estimated 30,000 men dead on both sides. Central Smolensk still marks that event with the Eagles monument, unveiled in 1912 to mark the centenary of the campaign.

  Smolensk's most haunting modern episode is the Katyn Massacre, which took place in 1940 some 18 kilometers from the city. Soviet NKVD forces murdered approximately 22,000 Polish prisoners of war there. The mayor of Smolensk at the time was Boris Menshagin; his deputy was Boris Bazilevsky. Both men later testified as key witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials concerning the killings. Seventy years after the massacre, on the 10th of April 2010, a Tu-154 military jet carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and ninety-four other senior political and military figures crashed in a wooded area near Smolensk while approaching the local military airport. All ninety-six passengers died on impact. The delegation had been traveling to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre.

• 6. World War II and the Archive

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  German forces captured Smolensk on the 16th of July 1941 during Operation Barbarossa. The first Soviet counteroffensive that August failed, but limited Soviet victories outside the city halted the German advance for roughly two months, giving Moscow's defenders critical time to prepare. Over 93 percent of the city was destroyed in the fighting, and the ancient icon of Our Lady of Smolensk, one of the most venerated objects in Russian Orthodoxy, was lost. In late 1943 Hermann Goring ordered General Gotthard Heinrici to destroy Smolensk under the Nazi scorched-earth policy. Heinrici refused. He was punished for that refusal. The city was liberated on the 25th of September 1943, and after the war it received the rare designation of Hero City.

  When Wehrmacht troops first occupied Smolensk in July 1941, they found something unexpected: the intact archives of the Smolensk Oblast Committee of the Communist Party. These records, known as the Smolensk Archive, were transported to Nazi Germany and a significant portion eventually reached the United States. For Western scholars and intelligence analysts during the Cold War, the archive provided a singular window into how Soviet local government actually functioned during the first two decades of the regime. The United States returned the archives to Russia in 2002.

• 7. City of Notable Names

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  Smolensk has produced figures whose impact extended well beyond the city limits. Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut, was born in 1934 in the Smolensk region and died in 1968. Mikhail Glinka, born in 1804 at Novospasskoye, became one of Russia's foremost composers before his death in 1857. Grigory Potyomkin, the statesman and close associate of Catherine the Great, was born in 1739 at Chizheva in the Smolensk region. Anatoly Kharlampiyev, born in 1906, developed Sambo, a Soviet martial art, before his death in 1979. Morris Markin, born in Smolensk in 1893, emigrated and went on to found Checker Motors Corporation in the United States, dying in 1970. Timofey Mikhaylov, born in 1859, became one of the assassins of Tsar Alexander II before his execution in 1881. In September 2013, the city celebrated its 1,150th anniversary with construction and renovation projects funded across the city, and the Central Bank of Russia issued commemorative coins in precious metals to mark the occasion.