Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Shortly after the Napoleonic War, the city's two outer defensive rings were replaced with
the tree-lined Boulevard Ring and Garden Ring roads. The Garden Ring became an in-
formal social boundary line: on the inside were the merchants, intellectuals, civil servants
and foreigners; on the outside were the factories and dosshouses.
Tolstoy's most famous novel War and Peacetells the story of five aristocratic families in
the lead-up to the Napoleonic invasion. The author used letters, journals, interviews and
other first-hand materials to create the realist masterpiece, which includes some 160
real-life historical characters.
Red Moscow
Revolutionary Moscow
The tsarist autocracy staggered into the new century. In 1904 the impressionable and irresol-
ute Tsar Nicholas II was talked into declaring war on Japan over some forested land in the
Far East. His imperial forces suffered a decisive and embarrassing defeat, touching off a na-
tionwide wave of unrest.
Taking their cue from St Petersburg, Moscow's workers and students staged a series of
demonstrations, culminating in the October 1905 general strike, forcing political conces-
sions from a reluctant Nicholas. In December the attempt by city authorities to arrest leading
radicals provoked a new round of confrontation, which ended in a night of bloodshed on
hastily erected barricades in the city's Presnya district.
Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov (Lenin) later called the failed 1905 Revolution the 'dress rehears-
al for 1917'. He had vowed that next time Russia's rulers would not escape the revolution-
ary scourge. Exhausted by three years of fighting in WWI, the tsarist autocracy meekly suc-
cumbed to a mob of St Petersburg workers in February 1917. Unwilling to end the war and
unable to restore order, the provisional government was itself overthrown in a bloodless
palace coup, orchestrated by Lenin's Bolshevik Party.
In Moscow, regime change was not so easy - a week of street fighting left more than
1000 dead. Radical socialism had come to power in Russia.
Fearing a German assault, Lenin ordered that the capital return to Moscow. In March
1918, he set up shop in the Kremlin and the new Soviet government expropriated the nicer
city hotels and townhouses to conduct affairs. The move unleashed a steady stream of
favour-seeking sycophants on the city. The new communist-run city government authorised
