Moscow Kremlin

The Moscow Kremlin is a walled citadel on Borovitsky Hill in the centre of Moscow, where the small Neglinnaya River once joined the Moskva. Its brick walls and towers, raised by Italian architects for Grand Prince Ivan III in the late fifteenth century, enclose palaces and cathedrals built over some six hundred years. It was the seat of Muscovite princes and tsars, then of the Soviet government, and it now houses the office of the Russian president, so that its name has long stood for the Russian state itself.

The hill was occupied long before Moscow existed: the Meryans lived there from about the second century BCE, and Slavs had settled its south-western end by the eleventh century, when the Vyatichi built a fortified enclosure at the river junction. Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy enlarged this fort in 1156. Mongol forces destroyed it in 1237, and Ivan I Kalita rebuilt it in oak in 1339. The word kremlin, meaning a fortress inside a town, is first recorded for the site in the early fourteenth century.

As the Grand Principality of Moscow rose, Dmitry Donskoy replaced the timber stockade with walls of white limestone in 1366 to 1368, and these held out against a siege by the khan Tokhtamysh. Churches and monasteries followed; in 1406 the icon painters Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev decorated the Cathedral of the Annunciation.

Ivan III remade the fortress on a grand scale. He invited architects from Renaissance Italy: Aristotele Fioravanti designed the Cathedral of the Dormition, finished in 1479, where the tsars would later be crowned, while Pietro Antonio Solari and Marco Ruffo worked on the walls, towers and the Palace of Facets, completed in 1491. The present red-brick walls date from 1485 to 1495, and a Latin inscription on the Spassky gate still honours Solari. The Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, burial place of most Muscovite rulers, followed in 1508, and the Ivan the Great Bell Tower reached its full height in 1600.

During the Time of Troubles Polish forces held the Kremlin from September 1610 until October 1612, when a volunteer army led by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin drove them out, opening the way for the first Romanov tsar. The seventeenth century added the Terem Palace and other buildings, but Peter the Great, who had escaped from the Kremlin with difficulty during the uprising of 1682, moved his capital to Saint Petersburg in 1703. The citadel remained the place of coronations, though it was often neglected.

In 1812, after the French invasion of Russia, Napoleon's troops held the Kremlin between 2 September and 11 October. On retreating, Napoleon ordered it blown up. Explosions between 21 and 23 October destroyed the Arsenal and parts of the wall and several towers, but rain spoiled some fuses and the damage was smaller than intended. Repairs followed from 1816, and between 1839 and 1849 Konstantin Thon built the Grand Kremlin Palace for Nicholas I on the site of an earlier Baroque palace.

The Soviet government moved from Petrograd to Moscow in March 1918, and Vladimir Lenin lived and worked in the Kremlin Senate building. Under the Soviet Union imperial eagles on the towers gave way to illuminated red stars, and the wall beside Red Square became a burial ground for Soviet notables. Religious buildings suffered heavily: the Chudov Monastery and the Ascension Convent were demolished for a military school, and over the whole Soviet period 28 of the Kremlin's 54 historic buildings were destroyed, among them 17 of its 31 churches and cathedrals. Between 1959 and 1961 Nikita Khrushchev added the modernist State Kremlin Palace for Communist Party congresses. In the Second World War the towers and roofs were repainted and disguised to confuse German aircraft.

The Kremlin, closed to tourists until 1955, reopened to visitors under Khrushchev, and the Kremlin Museums were founded in 1961. In 1990 UNESCO inscribed the Kremlin and Red Square on the World Heritage List, among the first sites in the Soviet Union to be listed. It remains the working seat of the Russian presidency; the interiors of the Grand Kremlin Palace were restored in the 1990s, and a helipad for the president was completed inside the walls in 2013.