The Fortress That Was Never Taken

Autumn, sixteen eleven. In the square in front of the kremlin, a butcher named Kuzma Minin stands before the townspeople and tells them one simple thing: the country is dying, and if not us, then who. Behind him rise stone walls that were, by then, already nearly a hundred years old. And it's this very kremlin, these very towers above the Volga River, that becomes the rallying point for a volunteer militia — an army raised by ordinary citizens — that within a year would march into Moscow and drive out the occupying Polish garrison.

Construction of the present stone kremlin began in the early sixteenth century, after a fire in fifteen thirteen burned the old wooden fortifications on this headland — where the Oka River meets the Volga — almost to the ground. Moscow needed a serious frontier fortress on its eastern approach. The design is credited to an Italian architect, Pietro Fryazin, and you can see his hand at once. Look at the battlements: that distinctive swallowtail notch, the same you'll find on the Moscow Kremlin, the same you'll find on the Sforza Castle in Milan. That's no coincidence — it's one school, one tradition of military architecture, one that Moscow's princes were then actively recruiting from Italy.

The walls here run up to five meters thick. The perimeter stretches close to two kilometers — among the longest of any kremlin in Russia. And you can still walk the entire loop along the battlements without a break, a rare thing this far along in a fortress's life. Notice the change in elevation: within the walls, the ground drops and climbs by about eighty meters. The walkway rises, then plunges — not an architect's flourish, but the landscape itself, deliberately built into the defense.

There were originally thirteen towers — five rectangular, eight round. Two are gone now. The rest project outward from the wall's line, a classic defensive trick: from angled slits in the towers, defenders could fire straight along the wall itself, so no attacker could get close enough to climb it.

And here's the fact that puts this kremlin in a class of its own among the country's fortresses: in its entire history, it was never taken by force. Not once. This isn't legend — it's simply the absence, in every chronicle, of a record of its fall. A fortress built as a frontier outpost, and one that never let anyone through.

Inside those walls, though, plenty else happened. In the seventeenth century, the Ivanovskaya Tower served as a political prison. So the kremlin wasn't only a shield against outside enemies — it was also a tool of state control, a place to lock away people the system itself considered dangerous.

By the nineteenth century, the kremlin nearly lost itself: sections of wall were dismantled, repaired without any real understanding of the original engineering, and the moat was filled in. The lower levels of the towers sat in permanent damp. A full restoration didn't begin until nineteen forty-nine, led by architect Svyatoslav Agafonov, who essentially reconstructed the logic of the old engineering from the traces still visible in the stone itself.

Today you can walk the walls, and the towers hold museum exhibits. But stop here on the battlements and look down at the Volga, and you'll understand why, from this very height, Minin could speak of resistance in a way that made people listen. A fortress that was never taken — that's an argument all its own.

Ask me about the Dmitrievskaya Tower, the kremlin's main gate. It holds the story of a foreign visitor who measured these walls in the eighteenth century and wrote down something the Russian archives would rather have forgotten.

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