Professor Simon Morrison *97 Explores Moscow’s History

The Book: Blending sweeping historical narrative with rich archival detail, A Kingdom and a Village (Knopf) is a vivid portrait of Moscow as both the symbolic and political heart of Russia. It traces the city’s evolution from a “big village”–the demeaning nickname given by the neighboring St. Petersburg nobility–into a vast and formidable metropolis shaped by centuries of invasion, upheaval, and reinvention. Drawing on sources ranging from early birchbark manuscripts that record the earliest days of Russian civilization to European newspaper articles describing the opening of the Bolshoi Theater, the various power struggles, cultural achievements, and environmental crises that have defined Moscow’s character are brought to life. This novel shows how Moscow’s enduring identity continues to shape Russia’s political and cultural present. To understand Moscow is to understand the deeper forces driving Russia itself. 

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The Author: Simon Morrison *97 is a Professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University and an accomplished archival historian specializing in 20th-century Russian and Soviet music. Morrison has also written extensively for publications including The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Time, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards. 

Excerpt:

The River

To mark the 800th anniversary of Moscow in 1947, the Soviet dictator, Iosif Stalin, ordered a team of archeologists in Kyiv to locate the grave of a prince named Yuri, the supposed founder of Moscow. In 1147, Yuri had reported his presence in a fort on a hill surrounded by a slow-moving river. A dirt and wood barrier failed to deter determined invaders. It was reinforced and expanded again and again over the centuries, until it became a symbol of sovereign power: the Kremlin, the official seat of the Russian and Soviet governments.

The archeologists’ goal was to find Yuri’s skull, which would guide the design of a statue of him across from Moscow City Hall. But nothing was found in the Church of the Savior on Berestov where Yuri was thought to have been buried, despite the promises of a plaque inside the chapel claiming “This is where he lies.” In 1989, three sarcophagi were found on the grounds along with a beer bottle containing an indecipherable note. One of them, it’s been hoped, contains the remains of Yuri, the others one of his sons and one of his wives. DNA tests have been inconclusive.

Nonetheless, the design competition for the statue went forward. The proposal submitted by Vera Mukhina depicted Yuri “in the magnificent ancient clothes of a Russian prince — no chain mail — in a long white cloak trimmed with gold stitching, held with a precious sparkling buckle.” He had soft features befitting the prince of a “capital of peace, goodness, art.” This design was rejected in favor of another by Sergey Orlov, who made Yuri a true Russian hero and a symbol of the nation’s might (his maternal Anglo-Saxon lineage aside). When the monument was belatedly unveiled, on June 6, 1954, one person yelled “Doesn’t look like him!” while another insisted “It does!” Communist hardliners argued that a statue of the prince, a feudal exploiter of the peasantry, didn’t belong in the middle of Soviet Moscow. They lost the argument.

Yuri girds for battle; his stallion raises a hoof. He is armored and helmeted with a heraldic shield boasting the coat of arms of Moscow: an image of St. George (Yuri’s patron saint) slaying a serpent. St. George symbolizes the combined power of the church and the state, which vanquish Russia’s enemies while punishing her people for their sins and disloyalty, represented by the serpent. “No matter how terrible the demon might be, power believes, and never doubts, that one day it will manage to defeat the monster and save us all,” medievalist Vladimir Sharov explains. Power looks after itself. Power exists for itself.

The prince sits high in his bronze saddle, pulling on his stallion’s reins with one of his long arms, pointing downward with the other, as if to say this is where it all began, where the walls went up and the moats were dug and princes, priests, and traders from the Silk Road gathered. Here is the spot near, if not the moment when, Moscow came into being as a fort on a hill along a river.

The river bears the same name as the city: Moscow or, in proper Russian pronunciation, Moskva. It’s shallow, murky, and freezes in winter, as do its various tributaries. The Neglinka, its largest tributary, runs underneath the center of Moscow and once served as a defensive moat before being encased in pipes in the eighteenth century. By that time, the Neglinka reeked of human and animal waste and needed to be buried. During severe droughts, the Moskva reluctantly withdrew from its banks and dried up in places. Between 1932 and 1937 an 80-mile-long canal was dug by prisoners to provide for the city’s industrial and domestic water needs. It connected the Moscow neighborhood of Tushino to a network of inland waterways and seas in the north. The alleys in the oldest parts of the city follow the contours of streams that no longer exist, having been rerouted or buried.

The Moskva flows from west to east through Moscow, the surrounding region, Moskovskaya oblast’, and a much older city named Smolensk. It eventually merges with the Oka River and then the Volga, the longest river in Europe, spanning well over 2,000 miles across boreal forests and desert basins to empty into the Caspian Sea. The Moskva was easily navigable by medieval canoes and sledges, so a ring-fenced settlement arose above a brackish bend. There were long, hard rains and snows, though in nature, as the cliché goes, there’s no such thing as bad weather. The forest drowsed in fall and rustled in spring; through the summer, crickets chirped and toads croaked in the marshes, and the meadow across the river hummed. The spirits of the water, wind, and wood had yet to clash with monks and priests and their belief in an almighty God who had made man in his image and granted him dominion over the birds and beasts.

Moscow existed long before Russia but for centuries had no influence, no role in affairs beyond its own wooden walls. The name itself denotes either a boggy place or black, turbid water; it might also, as tourist guides prefer, refer to female bears (from the Finno-Ugric words maska and ava, meaning bear and dam respectively). The Komi language suggests a derivation from moska, a cow, and va, which means either “river” or “wet.” Perhaps the Moskva River was a good spot for breeding cattle? A biblical explanation, popularized in the 16 century, claims that Moscow was named after Mosoch, a grandson of Noah who, according to the book of Genesis, succumbed with Noah to the seductions of wine. Mosoch arrived in the Russian lands and named the beautiful site he found overlooking a river after himself and his wife Kva. The combined names of their children became the name of a steep-banked stream, the Yauza. In this fanciful tale, Moscow is more than five thousand years old, but connections to turbid water and cows prove most convincing, because these have a root, mosk, in East Slavonic and relate, at heart, to the Russian word for “dank,” promozglïy.

The people who traveled and foraged along the river were called, in Old Norse and Old Swedish, Rus. Russian of course derives from Rus, a word also related to the Finnic Ruotsi and the Estonian Root’si, referring to Swedes, but the Rus were not Russian in the familiar sense. The original Rus seem to have been Scandinavian boatsmen, “the inhabitants of straits between islands.” A medieval illustration shows a dozen or so Rus tucked into a pair of sailboats on wheels, having rolled up to the walls of Constantinople from its northern shore. They look happy in their vessel. In winter, when the ice was thick enough, the boatsmen traveled on sledges piled up with goods. They also traveled by land over paths frozen hard as rock.

The origins of the word Slav, as in Slavic peoples or Slavic languages, is more obscure. Historians long ago cut the cord between Slav and slave, an invention of later times. The standard story is that Slav was pressed into service as slave because so many of the young women sold into bondage came from the East — most notably in 1382, when Asiatic horsemen descended from Genghis Khan sacked Moscow, flaying and burning thousands of people and dragging away thousands more. Etymological dictionaries also suggest a derivation from a Byzantine Greek word meaning “plunder,” which turns the Slavs into marauding pirates. Slav also sounds like slava, the Russian word for glory. But slav and slava might simply be homonyms. Linguistically slav better relates to slov, the Russian for “word.” In this conception, the Slavs were tribes who could understand one another, because they spoke the same or similar tongues. And there’s more: Slav/slov relates to the archaic verb “to hear/listen,” which establishes a neat binary between Slavs and nemtsi — literally “the dumb,” “those without speech,” or inarticulate. Nemtsi is a standard medieval word for “foreigners,” and in Russian is now the word for Germans. Lastly, there is an appealing correlation between the word Slav and the forgotten Indo-European word slauos. Who are the Slavs? They are what that word means: people.

Excerpted from A Kingdom and A Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow by Simon Morrison. Published March 2026 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Simon Morrison.

Review: 

"A magisterial account of Moscow that reveals the city’s history and something of its soul through countless interwoven stories and colorful characters. . . . A gripping and enlightening journey.” — Ben Rhodes, author of After the Fall