Smolensk

Smolensk stands on both banks of the upper Dnieper, on the old route from the Varangians to the Greeks, where boats were hauled from the Baltic rivers into the Dnieper. It was the seat of one of the strongest Rus' principalities, and its Svirskaya church of 1197 was admired as the finest building east of Kiev. The Mongols spared the city in 1240, but it paid tribute to the Horde and drifted into the orbit of Lithuania. When the Black Death struck in 1387, only five inhabitants are said to have survived, who walked out of the town and shut the gates behind them.

Vytautas of Lithuania won Smolensk in 1395 by spreading word that he marched against the Tatars; he took it back in 1404, after Oleg of Ryazan had briefly restored Prince Yury Svyatoslavich in 1401. The townspeople rose against Lithuanian rule in 1440, in the rising called the Great Turmoil. Muscovite sieges failed in 1502 and 1513, but Vasily III took the city in 1514 and founded Moscow's Novodevichy Convent in honour of the Smolensk icon of the Mother of God.

Fyodor Kon, master builder of Boris Godunov, raised a brick wall 6.5 km long around Smolensk between 1595 and 1602. It held out for some twenty months in 1609–11, under the voivode Mikhail Shein, before Sigismund III's army took the city; the Truce of Deulino left it to the Commonwealth. Shein came back in 1632 to besiege the city and surrendered in 1634, and Tsar Alexei finally retook the city on 23 September 1654.