History of Nizhny Novgorod

Nizhny Novgorod was founded in 1221 by Yuri (Georgy) Vsevolodovich, the Grand Prince of Vladimir and grandson of Yuri Dolgoruky. The chronicle entry tersely reports: “Grand Prince Gyurgi, son of Vsevolod, founded a town on the Volga at the mouth of the Oka and named it Novgorod the Lower.”

The fortress was placed on the high right bank, on the ridge above the confluence of the Oka and the Volga. The site was ideally protected — on one side by steep cliffs, on the other by a deep ravine. The new border outpost had a military mission: to shield the northeastern fringes of the Vladimir Principality from raids by the Volga Bulgars and to secure the mouth of the Oka for Rus.

Why “Lower”? There is still no single answer. The name is most often explained either by the town’s position relative to Veliky Novgorod or by its location in the “lower lands” along the Volga.

The princely fortress and the Nizhny Novgorod princes

The first fortress of Nizhny Novgorod was made of timber and earth: a rampart, a moat, and a log wall along the ridge. Just seventeen years later, in 1238, the city’s founder, Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich, was killed in the battle with Batu’s tumens on the Sit River, and the lands along the Volga fell under Mongol devastation. Nizhny endured occupation and burning in the first decades after the invasion, but the place proved too strategically important to abandon. By the 14th century the town had once again entered Vladimir’s, and later Moscow’s, calculations.

In 1341 Nizhny became the seat of the breakaway Nizhny Novgorod–Suzdal Principality. For a short period the city turned into an independent capital of Northeastern Rus. Prince Dmitry Konstantinovich conducted his own diplomacy with the Horde, and it was under him that the Nizhny Novgorod chronicle was begun. However, in 1377 on the Pyana River the Nizhny Novgorod army suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the Horde prince Arapsha. A year later Mamai’s army burned Nizhny itself to the ground. After this brief period of independence, the principality was finally annexed to Moscow by Vasily I in 1392, and Nizhny Novgorod became the eastern outpost of the Moscow princes.

The stone kremlin and a stronghold of the Muscovite Tsardom

Wooden walls could withstand neither fire nor Kazan raids. So in 1500 Moscow took the decision to build a stone kremlin. The work proceeded in fits and starts and was completed around 1515. From 1508–1509 the project was led by an Italian architect known in the Russian chronicles as Pyotr Fryazin. The kremlin came out imposing: thirteen towers, about two and a half kilometers of walls, and a difference in terrain of more than eighty meters between the lower and upper towers. From that point until the capture of Kazan in 1552, the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin remained the main Russian fortress on the eastern frontier, the base for the campaigns of Ivan III and Ivan the Terrible against the Kazan Khanate.

During the Time of Troubles, Nizhny became the key gathering point for the people’s militia. In the autumn of 1611, Kuzma Minin, the elected headman of the townspeople, addressed his fellow citizens from the ambo of the Nizhny Novgorod cathedral, calling on them to raise funds and men for the liberation of Moscow from the Polish intervention. Prince Dmitry Pozharsky joined the movement, and in 1612 it was the Second People’s Militia, assembled in Nizhny, that reached Moscow and drove the interventionists out of the Kremlin. Ivan Martos’s monument (1818) on Red Square in Moscow served as the prototype for the smaller copy installed in 2005 in Nizhny Novgorod on People’s Unity Square, at the foot of the kremlin.

Provincial Nizhny and the “pocket of Russia”

In 1714 Peter I made Nizhny Novgorod a separate province, and the city gained the status of administrative center of the Volga region. In 1722 Peter visited Nizhny in person on his way to the Persian Campaign and gave orders to repair the kremlin walls. For a century and a half after that, city life moved at a steady pace: the upper posad above the kremlin hill grew up with stone government buildings and churches, while the lower one filled with wharves and slobodas by the water.

The turning point for the city came in 1817. The previous year, in the summer of 1816, the Makaryev gostiny dvor — the main trading hub of Russia in the 17th–18th centuries, which had stood by the walls of the Makaryev–Zheltovodsky Monastery 90 versts downstream — burned down. After the fire, by decree of Alexander I, the fair was moved to Nizhny Novgorod, to the low-lying spit between the Volga and the Oka. By July 1817 more than a thousand temporary stalls had been set up there. A permanent gostiny dvor, designed by the engineer Augustin de Betancourt, was begun in 1818 and ceremonially opened in 1822. Within a few years Nizhny had turned into the largest trading hub of the empire. In summer Siberian merchants flocked here with furs, tea caravans came from Kyakhta, and Persian traders brought carpets and silk. By the end of the century the fair’s turnover reached 200 million rubles, and the city earned the nickname “the pocket of Russia.”

The peak of the fair era coincided with the XVI All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896 — the largest imperial showcase of industry and the arts before the revolution. A site next to the fair was set aside for the exhibition, and the country’s first electric tram line, funiculars down the slopes of the Kremlin Hill, and a city water supply were built for it. On the Strelka, Vladimir Shukhov erected the world’s first steel lattice hyperboloid structures — the very “Shukhov towers” from which all modern architecture of tensile shells descends. The city’s merchant class lined Rozhdestvenskaya and Bolshaya Pokrovskaya with mansions in the spirit of Eclecticism and Art Nouveau. The appearance of the historic center has largely preserved this merchant era to this day.

Industrial Gorky

After the revolution the city set out on the path of industrialization. In 1929 the USSR Supreme Council of the National Economy decided to build a full-cycle automobile plant near Nizhny Novgorod under a technology agreement with the Ford Motor Company. The plant was placed on the left bank of the Oka and put up in eighteen months. On January 1, 1932 GAZ went into operation, and on January 29, 1932 the first GAZ-AA one-and-a-half-tonner rolled off the assembly line. In October of the same year, to mark the 40th anniversary of Maxim Gorky’s literary career, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR renamed the city Gorky. The writer himself, born in Nizhny in 1868 into the family of the carpenter Kashirin, was against it, but the city bore his name for the next fifty-eight years all the same.

In the Great Patriotic War, Gorky became one of the key industrial bases of the rear. GAZ produced the T-60 and T-70 light tanks and frontline trucks, “Krasnoye Sormovo” turned out T-34 tanks, and the Ordzhonikidze aircraft plant built La-5 and La-7 fighters. The city endured more than twenty German bombings, the heaviest in the summer of 1943. By the end of the war, Nizhny Novgorod’s industry had supplied the front with a significant share of Soviet trucks and tank equipment. In memory of the Victory, the Chkalov Stairway was completed on the upper embankment — a descent of 560 steps in the shape of a figure eight. It was laid down in 1944 and opened in 1949. The stairway was named after the pilot Valery Chkalov, a native of the Nizhny Novgorod land.

Postwar Gorky turned into a city of the defense industry. From August 4, 1959, by resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the city was closed to visits by foreign citizens. A restricted zone was created around GAZ, “Krasnoye Sormovo” (where nuclear submarines were built), and the aircraft plant. Until 1991 Gorky was excluded from all Intourist programs, and Volga cruise ships passed it by at night without docking. The city lived in this isolation for more than thirty years. It was here that in 1980 academician Andrei Sakharov was sent under administrative supervision. In November 1985 the first line of the Gorky Metro opened, linking the Zarechnaya part with the auto plant. It was the tenth metro in the USSR, after those of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, Baku, Kharkov, Tashkent, Yerevan, and Minsk.

Return of the name and the anniversary

The reforms of the late 1980s reached the city’s name as well. In April 1990, 52% of the city’s residents voted in a referendum to bring back the historical name. On October 22, 1990 the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved the renaming, and Gorky became Nizhny Novgorod once again. On September 6, 1991 the closed-city status was officially lifted: international flights resumed, and the first foreign cruise ships entered the port.

In the 1990s Nizhny went through the same things as many large industrial centers in Russia: the slump at GAZ, a reduction in defense orders, an outflow of population. In 2000, by presidential decree, it became the center of the Volga Federal District, and the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Higher School of Economics gradually grew into one of the largest academic centers outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In 2018 Nizhny hosted six matches of the FIFA World Cup. A stadium with a capacity of about 44,000 seats was built on the Strelka for the tournament, and the Moskovsky railway station was reconstructed. For the city’s 800th anniversary in 2021, a large-scale restoration of the center took place: the kremlin towers were rebuilt, the Strelka and the late-19th-century pakgauzy were turned into a city-wide pedestrian and festival space, Zapochainye and the Ilyinskaya Sloboda were renovated, and the 800th Anniversary Park was laid out.

From that moment on, the city took on a new, post-industrial identity. The kremlin above the confluence of the rivers remained the symbolic center, the merchant quarters came back to life, and the Strelka now serves as the main festival venue of the Volga region. Eight centuries after the princely founding, Nizhny once again lives above all by virtue of its position on the Volga.