The earliest recorded reference to the city of Moscow dates back to the middle of the 12 th century (1147AD) when Prince Yuri Dolguruki ruled it. Under Prince Yuri, Moscow prospered as an important stop on all the major land and water trade routes between Europe and Asia. The Tatars conquered Moscow in 1237 and established an empire in the Volga that came to be known as the Golden Horde. The city lost some of its pre-eminence during two centuries of Tatar suzerainty but by the 1400s Moscow’s golden days had returned, when Ivan III got rid of the Golden Horde. His grandson, the notorious Ivan the Terrible was crowned Tsar of all of Russia in 1547 and Moscow became his capital city. Moscow’s control now stretched from   Novgorod in the west to Tula in the south, the Urals in the east to the Barents Sea in the north.
The unification and consolidation of Imperial Russia resulted in a glorious epoch in the city’s history. The tsars built fabulous palaces, churches, cathedrals and the imposing citadel of the Kremlin between the 17th and 18th centuries. Even after Peter the Great shifted his imperial capital to St. Petersburg in 1712, Moscow continued to be the spiritual capital of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as the cultural, educational and industrial centre of the empire. Reduced to rubble by Napolean’s forces in the autumn of 1812, Moscow rose like the phoenix, renewed from the ashes of its destruction.  New residences and factories were built and by the turn of the century, the city’s population had escalated to over one million.

Political power returned to Moscow when the Bolsheviks made it the Russian capital in 1918 post October Revolution. When the USSR was established in 1922, Moscow was designated capital of this new union of Socialist states. World War II found the Germans almost at Moscow's doorstep in 1941 but do or die Russian resistance prevented the final capture of the city and debunked the myth of Hitler’s invincibility. German bombers inflicted a great deal of damage on the city but it was soon rebuilt by the Soviets.

Moscow continues to play a pivotal role in the history of Russia. The city was centre-stage as the Communist grip relaxed under Gorbachev, glastnost and perestroika became bywords the world over and then, during the final act when the world watched the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.