A Traveller's Companion to Moscow

Inhabited since Neolithic times but not founded until 1147, Moscow was for much of its early history in thrall to other nations--to the Khans, to the Tartars and the Poles. The city was devastated by fire time and again, but with each rebuilding, miraculously, it grew ever more magnificent. For every church that was destroyed, it seemed that two more were built, compounding the resonance of Holy Russia, with its icons, its chanted liturgy, its packed and fervent congregations, pre-eminently resurgent. Through the voices of visitors and residents, the turbulent growth of this great city is recorded in this evocative and informative anthology: Peter the Great's bloody reprisals after the revolt of the streltsy in 1698; Napoleon's ignominious retreat from the burning city in 1812; the flowering of literary greatness in the nineteenth century and of the Moscow Art Theater in the twentieth; the dazzling profusion of jewels in the Treasury of the Kremlin. In this highly admired travel companion, these and other milestones in seven centuries of history are all vividly brought to life.