History of Veliky Novgorod

The city on the Volkhov River traces its history back to 859. This is the date given by the 16th-century Nikon Chronicle for Rurik’s arrival “at Lake Ilmen,” the building of a “town on the Volkhov,” and the beginning of the reign of the Varangian dynasty, which seven centuries later grew into the Rurikid line. That said, the date is conventional: the chronicle does not directly speak of the city’s founding, and archaeological evidence confirms that Slavic and Finno-Ugric settlements existed here long before the arrival of the Varangians. The Laurentian Chronicle, which describes Rurik’s arrival in these lands under the year 862, likewise mentions an already existing “town on the Volkhov.” The discrepancies between the chronicles do not change the essence: by the mid-9th century a major trading and tribal center had taken shape here at the crossroads of the route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” and the Volga route, and it soon entered the political life of the young Rus.

From Rurik to the Cathedral of St. Sophia

After Rurik’s death in 882, Prince Oleg and his druzhina moved south. Having seized Kiev, he transferred the capital there, but Novgorod retained its status as an important northern center and its right to “its own voice.” The princely residence stood at Rurikovo Gorodishche — a rise near the source of the Volkhov. Archaeological finds confirm that in the 9th–10th centuries the druzhinniks lived and skilled craftsmen worked here in close contact with Scandinavia and Byzantium.

In 989, a year after the baptism of Rus, Christianity came to Novgorod as well. According to the chronicles, the process was not easy: the townspeople were baptized “by fire and sword,” and some residents had to be driven into the water by force. By the early 11th century the city had definitively divided into two parts: the Sophia Side with the administrative and ecclesiastical center, and the Trade Side with Yaroslav’s Court and its bustling marketplace. In 1030 Yaroslav the Wise founded the Yuryev Monastery south of the city, which to this day remains one of the oldest monasteries in Russia.

In 1045–1050, under Prince Vladimir Yaroslavich, the Cathedral of St. Sophia was built on the Sophia Side — the oldest surviving stone church in the country. It was raised on the site of its burned-down wooden predecessor. The fate of the Novgorod Sophia proved happier than that of the Kiev one: the five-domed church with its 12th-century frescoes, the bronze Magdeburg Gates, and the “Our Lady of the Sign” icon has preserved the spirit of Old Rus for us better than any other monument. And in 1044, when the chronicles first mention the Novgorod Detinets, a wooden-and-earth fortress already stood here. The stone walls, roughly 1,487 meters long, appeared on this site later, by the end of the 15th century.

The era of the Novgorod veche

The turning point was the year 1136. On May 28, the Novgorod veche removed Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich from power. He was accused of cowardice at the Battle of Zhdanaya Hill and of disregarding the interests of the Novgorod land. The city emerged from direct Kievan control and began inviting princes by contract on its own. So was born the Novgorod Republic, which was destined to last 342 years.

Novgorod’s system of governance was unique for medieval Rus. The supreme authority became the veche, which elected the posadnik, the tysyatsky, and the archbishop (the “vladyka”), decided questions of war and peace, and approved laws. The prince was reduced to a hired military commander and judge. He was forbidden to own lands in Novgorod or to collect tribute beyond the terms of the contract. If he broke the terms, the prince faced “the showing of the way” — exile. Over more than two centuries more than a hundred princes came and went: some stayed for years, others were sent packing after a few months. Novgorod itself was divided during this period into five “ends” — Slavensky, Plotnitsky, Nerevsky, Zagorodsky, and Lyudin — and each sent its representative to the city-wide bodies.

In 1113–1136, St. Nicholas Cathedral rose on Yaroslav’s Court — the oldest princely church on the Trade Side. In 1119 the master Peter — one of the first Old Russian architects whose name has been preserved in the chronicles — completed the majestic St. George’s Cathedral at the Yuryev Monastery. To this same period belong the masterpieces that became symbols of the city: from the monumental Church of the Savior at Nereditsa to the tiny Church of the Nativity of the Virgin at the Peryn Skete.

When in 1237–1240 Batu’s Mongol army swept across Rus, Novgorod was spared. On the way to the city the Tatars stopped at the Ignach Cross tract and turned back — whether because of the spring thaw or because of the army’s exhaustion and dwindling supplies. Having avoided devastation, the city took a blow from the West. In 1240 the young prince Alexander Yaroslavich defeated the Swedes at the mouth of the Neva, earning the nickname Nevsky, and in 1242 he crushed the knights of the Livonian Order on the ice of Lake Peipus. The price of security was the acknowledgement of dependence on the Horde: Novgorod paid tribute regularly but preserved its self-government.

In the 13th century the city concluded its first trade treaties with German merchants, and by the mid-14th century Novgorod became the easternmost office of the Hanseatic League. At the Gotic and German Courts, next to the Marketplace, merchants from Lübeck, Visby, and Reval put up. From there caravans departed with furs, wax, and copper. In literacy Novgorod outstripped many cities of Europe. Birch-bark letters — business messages, receipts, love notes, and the schoolboy Onfim’s exercises — have been found by the hundreds in excavations, and they revealed a city in which not only monks knew how to read and write.

Under Moscow: the Oprichnina and the Time of Troubles

The second half of the 15th century became a time of hard choices for the republic. Moscow pressed ever more heavily, and part of the boyar class, led by Marfa the Posadnitsa (Marfa Boretskaya), sought an alliance with Lithuania. Ivan III would not tolerate it: in 1471 a Muscovite army routed the Novgorodians at the Battle of Shelon. Seven years later, in 1478, Ivan III undertook a second campaign, abolished the veche, deposed the posadnik and the archbishop, confiscated the estates of the boyar families, and ordered the veche bell — the symbol of Novgorod’s liberty — to be carried off to Moscow. From that moment the Novgorod land became part of the unified Russian state.

However, the darkest pages of the city’s history were still ahead. In the winter of 1569–1570 Ivan the Terrible suspected Novgorod of treason in favor of Lithuania and brought his oprichnina army here. The punitive expedition lasted about five weeks; by various estimates the number of dead ranges from two to fifteen thousand people, out of a city population of about thirty thousand. To the violence were added a famine following a crop failure and an epidemic. Novgorod lost a substantial part of its inhabitants and never restored its former commercial power.

The final blow was the Time of Troubles. In July 1611 the city was seized by Swedish troops under the command of Jacob De la Gardie. The occupation lasted six years. Under the terms of the Treaty of Stolbovo of 1617, Novgorod returned to Moscow’s rule, but the price was Russia’s loss of access to the Baltic Sea — for nearly a century, until the reforms of Peter I. The city began a slow recovery, but it never managed to reach its former scale again.

The gubernia century and the “Millennium of Russia”

With the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703, the old trading hub found itself off to the side of the main routes: new roads to the Baltic ran around Novgorod. In 1727 the city became the center of the newly established Novgorod Governorate, which covered lands from Olonets in the north to Tver and Velikiye Luki in the south. However, after Catherine II’s reform of 1776, the borders of the governorate shrank, and Novgorod turned into a quiet uezd-gubernia town, known more for its monuments than for its economy.

A landmark event of the 19th century was the unveiling in 1862 of the “Millennium of Russia” monument, timed to the anniversary of Rurik’s summoning. The monument by Mikhail Mikeshin — a bronze “cap of Monomakh” adorned with 129 figures ranging from Rurik and Princess Olga to Pushkin and Gogol — became the dominant feature of the Detinets. The unveiling was attended by Emperor Alexander II and became the main Novgorod event of the 19th century. The same anniversary was marked by the restoration of the Cathedral of St. Sophia and the cleaning of the frescoes of the Savior at Nereditsa. Novgorod was turned into the main scholarly laboratory for the study of Old Russian architecture.

The 20th century and the return of the name

In 1917 Novgorod met the revolution relatively calmly, and in the Soviet years it became an administrative center — in 1944 the Novgorod Region was formed. Far harder was the decade of the war. From August 15, 1941 to January 20, 1944, the city was under German occupation. Over these two and a half years almost the entire architectural ensemble was looted and destroyed: the Germans managed to dismantle the “Millennium of Russia” monument for shipment to Germany, the Cathedral of St. Sophia lost its crosses and roof, and the Church of the Savior at Nereditsa was shelled by artillery. When the Red Army entered the city on January 20, 1944, about forty undamaged buildings remained.

Reconstruction began immediately. Already on November 7, 1944, the “Millennium of Russia” monument was reopened in the center of the Detinets. The fragments of the monument were gathered and raised within ten months of the city’s liberation. The master plan for rebuilding Novgorod as a museum-city was approved in March 1945 under the direction of academician Alexey Shchusev. By the 1960s the restoration of the Cathedral of St. Sophia had been completed, and in 1964, ten kilometers from the center, the Vitoslavlitsy Museum of Wooden Architecture was opened. Log-built churches, peasant huts, and chapels of the 12th–18th centuries from Novgorod villages were brought there.

In 1992 the monuments of Novgorod and its surroundings were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. This is a rare case in which not a single object but the whole historical and architectural landscape of the city and its outskirts was placed under protection. In 1999 Novgorod was given back its historical name: by decree of the President of Russia the city was officially renamed Veliky Novgorod. This is how it was referred to in chronicles from the 14th century, to distinguish it from the younger Nizhny.

Today the city is home to about 222,000 people. It retains its status as the administrative center of the Novgorod Region and possesses one of the densest concentrations of pre-Mongol monuments in Russia. Much of what is usually known from textbooks — birch-bark letters, the veche, the Hansa, Alexander Nevsky, the 11th-century Cathedral of St. Sophia — was laid down right here, on the two banks of the Volkhov, between Lake Ilmen and the Kremlin hill.