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"Moscow people do not drink coffee as the Petersburg aristocrats and bureaucrats do. Moscow merchants, teachers priests, industrialists drink tea 'until the seventh sweat,' as we say. They drink tea, sweat, dry themselves with a towel and start all over again. A Muscovite has seen a lot, knows his worth, but doesn't put on airs. He has an open Russian face, not necessarily with an uplifted bulbous nose. He also has an open soul. He is not cold like Petersburg people—he is passionate and sincere. He keeps all holidays and fast days, but during Muslenitsa (butterdish time; i.e., carnival) he stuffs himself with bliny, drinks beer and vodka until he is dizzy, rides around in sleighs, shouts, plays the accordion and—sins. A Muscovite says, 'If one doesn't sin one cannot repent, and if one doesn't repent one cannot be saved.'"
This is a picture of the real heroes of Moscow's history—Moscow's people who lived between the heights of cathedrals and citadels. But history sums up Moscow's 800 years not by telling of the peoples anonymous pageant, but by chronicling the rise of their rulers. The pageant started with a hermit called Bukal who lived in the midst of a thick morass by the banks of the Moskva River, where the Kremlin stands today.
The Masters. Just 800 years ago, the hermit's peace was disturbed. The region at that time was under the dominion of a boyar called Stephen Ivanovich Kuchko who had a pretty wife. A neighboring prince, one Yuri Dolgoruki (meaning Long-Arm),*quarreled with the boyar because (at least according to one version) he wanted Kuchko's wife. Long-Arm seized Kuchko's domains, threw a bang-up banquet on what later became Kremlin hill, and decided that this spot—with its roads and rivers crossing in all directions —would be a good place for a town. He called it Moskva after the river.
That event in 1147 first put Moscow on the map. At the time, London was already a thriving city which had achieved trial by jury and relatively democratic city government and Vienna was coming along nicely under Margrave Henry of Babenberg, who started the building of St. Stephan's Cathedral.
Long-Arm was succeeded by many rival princes, among them Basil the Cross-eyed, who later became Basil the Sightless and Ivan Kalita, called Moneybag, who first gave Moscow something like an ordered economy. The young town was repeatedly overrun by the Golden Horde of Tartars, one of whose reasons for coming back again & again was Moscow's women, much coveted on the world slave markets. Sultan Ahmed I is said to have asked his eldest son one day: "My Osman, wilt thou conquer Crete for me?" Whereupon Osman replied: "What have I to do with Crete? I will conquer the land of the white Muscovite maidens."