Moscow's Long Memory

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

This atlas records 1991 as Russia's founding year, the year the Soviet Union dissolved and the Russian Federation became the state whose borders, population and government exist today. That date is honest about the current state and honest about almost nothing else. Moscow first appears in the historical record in 1147, in a monastic chronicle describing a banquet the prince of Suzdal hosted there, a traditional founding date for the city even though archaeology shows people had already been living on the site since the Neolithic. Moscow grew into the seat of its own principality, then the capital of Muscovy by the late thirteenth century, then the Tsardom of Russia under Ivan the Terrible in 1547, then lost its status as capital when Peter the Great moved the seat of government to St. Petersburg in 1712, nine years before the Tsardom was proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, so St. Petersburg, not Moscow, was already the Empire's capital from the very start; the capital returned to Moscow only on 12 March 1918. Soviet rule followed in 1922, then the Russian Federation in 1991. Six names, six governments, one continuously inhabited capital region: 1991 answers only the narrowest possible version of when Russia began, a single state's founding date, and no more than that.