History of Pskov

Pskov stands at the confluence of two rivers — the Velikaya and the Pskova — and this geography shaped its entire fate. The town grew as a frontier fortress on the western edge of the Russian lands, at the crossroads of trade routes between the Baltic and the northeast of Rus’. Hence the character of its history: for a thousand years Pskov defended, traded, quarrelled with its neighbours and even existed as a separate state, until it dissolved into the larger Moscow story. The town’s name itself comes from the Pskova River. There is still no single accepted reading of the toponym, but most linguists trace it to Finno-Ugric or Baltic roots meaning “resinous water” or “fish river”.

The first mention and Princess Olga

The earliest record of Pskov is dated 903 in the Tale of Bygone Years. The chronicle reports that for the Kievan prince Igor “a wife was brought to him from Pleskov, by the name of Olga”. This brief phrase forever linked the town with its patroness — Princess Olga, the future ruler of Kievan Rus’ and the first Christian of the princely line. By tradition, she was born in the village of Vybuty, twelve versts downstream from Pskov along the Velikaya.

A second story is also associated with Olga’s name — the founding of the Trinity Cathedral. A later chronicle relates how the princess stood on the right bank of the Velikaya and saw three rays of sunlight above the cape. The rays converged to a single point. After this she ordered a church to be built there in the name of the Holy Trinity. Construction is dated to 957. This legend not only determined the dedication of Pskov’s main cathedral but also the choice of site for the future Krom — the stone fortress that grew up on the same headland.

In the 10th–12th centuries Pskov functioned as a suburb of Novgorod: administratively subordinate, but with its own way of life, developed trade and a fighting retinue. By the 12th century the Krom was already built of stone. The princely seals of that period are the first to show its emblem — a leopard on a red-and-gold field, which later became the town’s coat of arms.

The principality, Dovmont and the stone Krom

In the 13th century Pskov found itself under pressure from two sides. From the west the Livonian Order and the crusaders were advancing; from the east the dictate of Novgorod was growing. In 1240 the knights took advantage of internal strife and briefly seized Pskov. Only the campaign of Alexander Nevsky returned the town to Russian hands. The Battle on the Ice on Lake Peipus on 5 April 1242 became one of the central events of the town’s memory. Later a monument with an equestrian figure of the prince would be set up on Mount Sokolikha in his honour.

A quarter of a century later, in 1266, the Pskov throne was taken by the Lithuanian prince Dovmont, who had fled from feuds in his homeland and accepted Orthodoxy under the name Timofey. He spent more than thirty years in Pskov. In that time he managed to defeat the Livonians in several campaigns and added a fortified posad to the Krom, which has since been called the Dovmont Town. Here, between the inner fortress and the wall of the new posad, around two dozen stone churches eventually rose. This was a density of parishes per hundred metres of ground unparalleled in any Russian town. The foundations of these churches still lie under the open sky today and make up an archaeological ensemble within the walls.

In the 14th century the town surrounded itself with two more rings of walls — those of the Middle Town and the Okolny Town. The fortifications stretched for more than nine kilometres in circumference. The Okolny wall and the walls of Zapskovye even closed off the left bank of the Pskova River, and in the area of its fortified territory Pskov long outstripped most European cities of its time.

The Pskov veche republic

By the middle of the 14th century the actual self-rule of Pskov had become the norm. In 1348 the Bolotovo Treaty was signed in the village of Bolotovo on the Shelon River. Veliky Novgorod recognised the independence of the Pskov veche, gave up sending its own posadniks and intervening in local affairs. From that year it is customary to count the existence of the Pskov veche republic.

Power in it belonged to the assembly of free townsmen — the veche, which gathered by the Trinity Cathedral. Posadniks were elected from the boyars and merchantry; the town’s regiments went on campaign under a red-and-gold banner with a leopard. In 1397 the veche approved the Pskov Judicial Charter — one of the most elaborate legal codes of medieval Rus’. It set out in detail the procedure of the commercial court, questions of inheritance, the protection of contractual obligations and the adversarial procedure.

The 14th and 15th centuries were a time of architectural flowering. The Pskov architectural school took shape — a recognisable style with squat cubic churches built of local limestone slabs, eight-pitched roofs, “wall-set” belfries and restrained exterior decoration. Among its monuments are the churches of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel in Gorodets, of the Intercession at the Breach, of Cosmas and Damian by the Bridge, of the Epiphany in Zapskovye, and the cathedral of John the Baptist of the Ivanovsky Monastery. Earliest of all was the Transfiguration Cathedral of the Mirozhsky Monastery — built in the mid-12th century, with pre-Mongol masonry and frescoes by Byzantine masters. In 2019 ten churches of the Pskov school were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The republic lived by trade with the Hanseatic League. From Pskov to Dorpat, Riga and Reval went wax, honey, flax and hides; back came salt, cloth and metals. The trading yard of the German merchants operated in the town for several centuries.

Under Moscow: the siege by Báthory and the Time of Troubles

Pskov’s independence ended without an assault. In 1510 Grand Prince Vasily III announced the town’s annexation to the Muscovite state. On 13 January the last assembly was held on the veche square by the Trinity Cathedral. The bell that summoned the people of Pskov to the veche was taken down and carried off to Moscow. Muscovite governors were installed in the Pskov Krom; about three hundred noble families were sent off to inner towns and replaced with newcomers from other districts. So ended a republic that had lasted a century and a half.

Already as a frontier town of the Muscovite state, Pskov withstood the chief military trial of its history — the Pskov Defence of 1581–1582. The Polish king Stefan Báthory approached the walls in August 1581 with an army that by then had managed to return Polotsk and Velikiye Luki to the Poles. The town’s voyevoda was Prince Ivan Petrovich Shuisky. About twenty thousand defenders faced more than forty thousand besiegers. Thirty-one assaults were repelled over five months of siege — the fortress did not surrender. It was beneath these very walls that the famous episode took place with the Pokrovskaya Tower breached by cannon fire and the icon of the Mother of God, after which the breach was retaken and sealed up that same night. The failure to take Pskov forced Báthory to sit down to negotiations. In January 1582 the truce was signed at Yam-Zapolsky; Russia retained its ancestral lands.

In the Time of Troubles the town had a hard time of it: in 1611 the “Pskov thief” was proclaimed in Pskov — the pretender False Dmitry III. For several years strife raged in the streets between the “lesser people” and the boyars before the town once again swore allegiance to Moscow. Already under Mikhail Fyodorovich, Pskov repelled the Swedish assault of 1615 led by Gustavus II Adolphus. The first onslaught was beaten back with heavy losses for the Swedes, and after several months of siege the king broke camp and withdrew to Narva.

From a governorate to our days

With Peter I’s victory at Poltava and the borders shifted far to the west, Pskov began to lose its role as Russia’s main outpost. In the Great Northern War, after the defeat at Narva in 1700, Peter made Pskov his headquarters and urgently ordered the old walls to be reinforced with earthen bastions. Traces of these Petrine ramparts can still be discerned near the Krom and the Pokrovskaya Tower. But by the middle of the 18th century the town had become a deep rearguard.

In 1777 Catherine II established the Pskov Vicegerency, which in 1796 was transformed into the Pskov Governorate. The centre acquired a classicist plan, stone administrative buildings, a gymnasium and a theological seminary. On 10 February 1859 the first train of the St Petersburg–Warsaw line arrived in Pskov. This gave a push to the development of flax and leather mills. By the end of the 19th century about fifty factories and works were already operating in the town.

The twentieth century began for Pskov with a historical denouement. On 2 March 1917, at Pskov station, in the carriage of the imperial train, Nicholas II signed his abdication from the throne for himself and for his son — and so, just a few hundred metres from the Krom, three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty came to an end.

After a brief respite the hardest chapter began. On 9 July 1941 German units of Army Group North entered the town. The occupation lasted three years, until 23 July 1944, when units of the 3rd Baltic Front liberated Pskov. By the time of liberation, only ruins remained of pre-war Pskov: the centre had been burned out, hundreds of buildings destroyed, and a significant portion of the inhabitants had perished or been deported to Germany. Pskov was rebuilt according to a special post-war plan, by which the historic centre was deliberately reconstructed in its former silhouettes and scale — with no Soviet high-rises around the Krom.

The post-war revival went hand in hand with the restoration of antiquities. In the 1960s and 1970s archaeologists excavated the Dovmont Town, restorers cleaned the frescoes of the Mirozhsky Cathedral, and the Mikhailovskoye museum-reserve in a neighbouring district turned into the country’s largest Pushkin centre. In 2009 Pskov was awarded the title “City of Military Glory”. In 2019 ten churches of the Pskov school were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, securing the town’s place as one of the chief centres of Old Russian architecture on the modern tourist map.

Today about 185,000 people live in Pskov. The Krom still stands at the confluence of the Velikaya and the Pskova, the Trinity Cathedral remains the town’s main church, and the stone belfries on its streets serve as the same landmarks as a thousand years ago.