History of Tver

Tver rises on the left bank of the Volga, at the point where the Tvertsa and the Tmaka flow into it — on a site where, even before the city appeared, overland and water routes converged between Novgorod, Vladimir and, later, Moscow. This geography largely shaped its fate: a princely capital on the river, a merchant harbour, a city on the direct road between the two capitals, a provincial centre laid out according to Catherine’s regular plan, and finally the industrial Kalinin, which became Tver again in 1990.

Foundation and the first centuries

The year 1135 is conventionally accepted as the official date of foundation. It was then that a charter of the Novgorod prince first mentioned “Tver merchants” — evidence that the settlement was already a notable trading hub. The first direct chronicle reference to the town under the name “Tfer” dates to 1208–1209 and is linked to the internecine wars of the Vladimir princes.

The etymology of the name is still disputed. There are two main versions: the Slavic one, which traces the word to “tverd” (a stronghold), and the Finno-Ugric one, which links it to the name of the swift Tvertsa river. Either way, the historical fact remains: from the very beginning Tver was not a rural churchyard but a fortified harbour on the Volga.

In the pre-Mongol period Tver remained a border outpost of the Vladimir-Suzdal lands, but it barely featured in the wider history of Rus. The turning point came in the middle of the 13th century. According to various accounts, between 1247 and 1252 a separate principality was established here, which passed to Yaroslav Yaroslavich, the younger brother of Alexander Nevsky. He became the first prince of Tver and, after 1263, Grand Prince of Vladimir, combining the two titles. From that moment on, for a century and a half, Tver became one of the main political centres of North-Eastern Rus.

Rivalry with Moscow and the journey of Afanasy Nikitin

At the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries the Principality of Tver was so strong that it seriously challenged the rising Moscow for the right to speak in the name of all Rus. The key figure of that era was Mikhail Yaroslavich of Tver (c. 1271–1318). He held the yarlyk for the grand princely throne from 1305, built a stone kremlin on the Volga promontory, and openly rivalled the Moscow prince Yuri Danilovich.

The rivalry culminated in the Battle of Bortenevo in 1317, in which the Tver army won a victory — rare for that era — over the combined forces of Moscow and the Horde. Yet the triumph turned into tragedy: on the denunciation of his rivals, Mikhail was summoned to the headquarters of Khan Uzbek and executed. His body was taken to Tver and a year later buried in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Saviour. In 1549 the prince was canonised, and today his equestrian monument on Sovetskaya Square has become a symbol of the city.

The final chapter of the rivalry with Moscow was written on 15 August 1327. The people of Tver rose up against the Horde’s baskak Chol-khan — a cousin of Khan Uzbek who had occupied the prince’s palace and terrorised the town. After Chol-khan’s retinue was killed, the Horde responded with the punitive “Fedorchuk’s Host”, supported by troops from Moscow and Suzdal.

Tver was devastated, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich fled to Pskov, and the yarlyk for the grand princely throne passed to the Moscow prince Ivan Kalita. Although the Principality of Tver preserved its independence for another century and a half — minting its own coinage and carrying on brisk trade with Lithuania and the Horde — its political primacy was lost for good.

Afanasy Nikitin

It was at the twilight of Tver’s independence that an event took place which inscribed the city into world history. Around 1466 (by another dating, 1468) the local merchant Afanasy Nikitin set off with a trading caravan down the Volga. Having lost his goods, he did not return home but continued through Derbent and Persia, reaching the shores of India.

Having lived there for several years, Nikitin returned home via the Black Sea, but died near Smolensk in 1472 or 1474. His travel notes — “The Journey Beyond the Three Seas” — became a unique literary monument. It was the first account in Russian history not of a pilgrimage to holy places but of a business trip to distant lands. Nikitin’s work anticipated similar European descriptions of the route to India by decades. Today the memory of the great traveller is preserved in the monument on the Zavolzhskaya embankment across the Volga, which bears his name.

Under Moscow: from annexation to the fire of 1763

In 1485, after a brief campaign and without a major battle, Ivan III annexed Tver to the Moscow state: the last prince of Tver, Mikhail Borisovich, fled to Lithuania. Formally the appanage status was retained for some time by the heirs of the Moscow grand princes, but in practice the city became one of the district centres of the young Rus. From Moscow’s rival, Tver turned into its nearest Volga port and a station on the road to the northern lands.

The Time of Troubles brought devastation to the city: in 1609 battles broke out here between the Polish-Lithuanian invaders and the combined force of the Swedes under Jacob De la Gardie and the militia of Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky. Recovery was slow, but already in the second half of the 17th century Tver flourished again as a trading and craft centre. This was aided by its favourable position on the waterway from the Upper Volga to Novgorod.

Tver’s role grew sharply after the founding of Saint Petersburg: building the new capital required a continuous flow of goods from the south and east, and along the Tvertsa and the Vyshnevolotsk water system, opened in 1709, barges travelled from the Volga region straight into the mouths of the Neva. Tver turned out to be the key transshipment point on this route.

In 1708 the city became part of the Ingria (later Saint Petersburg) Governorate; in 1719 it became the centre of a province; and in 1775 the centre of the independent Tver Viceroyalty, later reorganised into a governorate. By this point Tver was already a densely built wooden town with a stone kremlin and dozens of churches. It was precisely this dense wooden building fabric that played a cruel trick on it.

On 12 May 1763 a catastrophic fire broke out in Tver. Within a few hours almost the entire central part burned down: the kremlin, the trading rows, the administrative buildings, as well as hundreds of dwelling houses. Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne, treated the incident as an opportunity to rebuild the provincial town on the model of the capital. About a million roubles were allocated for the reconstruction, and an “architectural team” led by Pyotr Romanovich Nikitin was sent to supervise the works; it included the young Matvey Kazakov, who received his first serious practice here.

“A little Petersburg”: Tver as a provincial capital

The plan, approved in the autumn of 1763, was truly revolutionary for the Russian provinces. Instead of a tangled medieval grid, the centre was given a strict regular scheme: from the semicircular Polutsirkulnaya (now Sovetskaya) Square, three broad streets fanned out like rays — Millionnaya (Sovetskaya), Novotorzhskaya and Kosaya Novgorodskaya. The blocks became rectangular, houses along the streets were built strictly on the “red line” and to standard model facades, while along the Volga embankment the famous “continuous facade” grew up — an unbroken ribbon of Classicist buildings that remains one of the most coherent architectural ensembles in Russia to this day.

The symbol of the renewed town became the Imperial Travel Palace, erected in 1764–1766 by P. R. Nikitin and M. F. Kazakov in the style of early Classicism with Baroque details. It was intended as a resting place for the royal family on the road between Moscow and Saint Petersburg and was later rebuilt more than once (notably by Carlo Rossi). Practically every ruler of the empire stayed here, from Catherine II to Nicholas II, as did Pushkin, for whom Tver was a familiar stop on the great road. Seeing the transformed town, Catherine II called it “the most beautiful after Petersburg” — a phrase that has entered Tver’s history for good.

In the 19th century Tver finally took shape as a solid provincial capital. In 1851 the country’s first main-line railway from Petersburg to Moscow passed through the city, and the Tver station became one of the main stops on the line, setting the rhythm of urban life for decades. River transport gradually gave way to the rails, but did not disappear entirely.

From the second half of the century Tver was rapidly gaining industrial weight. In 1858–1859 the Old Believer manufacturer Savva Vasilyevich Morozov and his son Timofey founded the Tver Manufactory Association — a cotton mill on the right bank of the Tmaka. Next to it, between the 1870s and the 1910s, grew up the Morozov Town, a whole district of more than fifty buildings: production halls, “Gothic” brick barracks for the workers, a hospital, as well as a school, a theatre and the famous “Paris” barracks. For turn-of-the-century Russia this was a rare example of a carefully planned company town, and its layout has survived to our day, if in a difficult state.

The city’s cultural life was developing too. A theatre had existed in Tver since 1745 (today’s Drama Theatre is one of the oldest in the country); in 1866 the Tver Real School opened, and there was a provincial press and a local history museum. In 1860–1862 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin served here as vice-governor — his Tver impressions became the basis of “The History of a Town”. On 28 August 1901 the first electric tram went along Millionnaya — six years earlier than in Saint Petersburg. And in 1900 the Old Volga Bridge was thrown across the Volga — an elegant Art Nouveau arched structure that is still considered one of the city’s calling cards.

From Kalinin to Tver: the 20th–21st centuries

The Revolution and the Civil War treated Tver relatively gently: the city avoided large-scale destruction, although the economy fell into decline and the famous Morozov manufactory was nationalised and renamed “Proletarka”. In 1929 the Tver Governorate was abolished, and for a short time the city was included in the Moscow Region. On 20 November 1931 Tver was given the name “Kalinin” — in honour of a native of the neighbouring village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa, the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Mikhail Kalinin. Four years later the Kalinin Region was formed, with its centre in the eponymous city.

The most tragic page of the 20th century was the Great Patriotic War. In October 1941 the front approached the city, and on 14 October Kalinin was seized by units of the Wehrmacht’s 3rd Panzer Group. It was the only regional centre in the European part of Russia to be captured during the Battle of Moscow. The occupation lasted exactly two months: on 16 December 1941 troops of the Kalinin Front under the command of Ivan Konev liberated the city. The destruction was enormous: historic quarters burned down, the Old Volga Bridge was blown up (it was rebuilt only by 1947), and the Travel Palace, the railway station and dozens of churches were seriously damaged.

The post-war decades made Kalinin a typical Soviet industrial centre: a railway carriage plant and an excavator plant were built here, as well as “Khimvolokno”, a printing combine, textile mills, and major research and educational institutes. New residential districts appeared — Yunost, Yuzhny, Chaika — and by the mid-1980s the population had passed 400,000. In parallel, in the 1970s a methodical restoration of the historic core began: embankments, churches and the Travel Palace were being restored, and in 1975 a museum of the Tver Land opened in the building of the former River Terminal.

The return of the historic name became a symbol of the changes of the late 1980s. The movement to restore old names, supported by the local intelligentsia and local historians, led to a result: on 14 November 1989 the city authorities voted to bring back the name Tver. On 17 July 1990 the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, Boris Yeltsin, signed the decrees “On Renaming the City of Kalinin as the City of Tver” and “On Renaming the Kalinin Region as the Tver Region”. Thus ended the sixty-year Kalinin period.

The thirty-five post-Soviet years have passed under the sign of careful stewardship of the heritage. The Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Saviour has been recreated on its historic foundation, and the Imperial Travel Palace has been restored, and now houses the regional art gallery. Monuments have appeared in the city to Mikhail of Tver, Afanasy Nikitin, Pushkin, Saltykov-Shchedrin and even to Mikhail Krug — a native of Tver whose bronze figure on Radishchev Boulevard has become one of its modern landmarks. The pedestrian Tryokhsvyatskaya Street has turned into the main promenade, and the launch of the “Sapsan” express in 2009 cut the journey to Moscow to one hour, restoring Tver’s status as the “near station” between the two capitals.

Today’s Tver is a many-layered city: the chronicled capital of a principality, the “little Petersburg” of the Catherine era, industrial Kalinin, and a modern regional centre. All these eras coexist in the compact space between the Tvertsa, the Tmaka and the Volga, turning a walk through the centre into an absorbing reading of Russian history.