Ancient Pskov

Until 1348, Pskov was nominally under the protection of Novgorod. Pskovians associate their striving for independence with Prince Vsevolod (Gavriil), who had been driven away from Novgorod and was welcomed by Pskovians. Vsevolod is the legendary founder of the city’s Trinity Cathedral, though he died soon after ascending Pskovian throne. (The present Trinity Cathedral is the third incarnation and dates to 1699.)

Another Pskov prince whose name is shrouded in legend is Dovmont (Timofey). He ruled Pskov from 1266-1299, or for 33 years – a magical number among Russians. A Lithuanian by birth, Dovmont married Alexander Nevsky’s granddaughter, Maria, a symbol of his close ties with the Russian land.

The 14th and 15th centuries were the Golden Age of the Pskov republic, with the balance of legislative and executive force residing in the veche (citizens’ assembly). At the beginning of the 16th century, however, Pskov had to bow before the Great Muscovite Prince Vasily III, who in 1510 “took the city without a battle,” according to the Chronicle. Still, Pskov remained disobedient and unruly for centuries to come. According to legend, the bell on Saint Nicholas-on-Usokha Church started tolling all by itself as Ivan the Terrible rode by. His horse was startled and Ivan got ennervated. He ordered the bell’s tongue cut out, and the legend says that the bell bled from this act.

In 1610, during the Time of Troubles, Pskov rebelled against Moscow and accepted the tsarist pretender, False Dmitry, who claimed to be Ivan’s son. Among the church plates in Kosma and Damian-on-Primostye Church there was later found a wooden cross whose inscription revealed that the church had been consecrated “under the Great Prince Dmitry Ivanovich.”

Petersburg’s predecessor

Before 1703, Pskov’s advantageous location on the northwest border of Russia made it an important political and commercial center. On the eve of the 18th century, Peter the Great, expecting the Swedes to attack Pskov, decided to improve the fortifications of the city, whose medieval fortress was not fit to withstand modern military technology. While in Pskov, Peter stayed at the boyar Yamskoy’s chambers and frequented Peter and Paul Cemetery Church, even singing with the church choir.

The foundation of Petersburg, however, meant the decrease in Pskov’s significance and, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it remained a remote corner of the Russian empire. But Pskov region was to poke its head up one more time in the footnotes of history’s pages.

In February 17, at a small railway station about 120 km from Pskov named Dno, Tsar Nicolas II abdicated the Russian throne, signing the letter of abdication on his way to Pskov. The ominous name of the station (dno means “bottom”) evoked associations with another tragedy of the not so distant past. In 1861, an uprising of peasants after the abolition of serfdom led to their execution by firing squad at a Kostroma region railway station called Bezdna (“abyss,” literally “without a bottom”). The Russian-American poet Vladimir Nabokov later contemplated the symbolic route which late Russian autocracy had traveled: from Bezdna to Dno. Ending in Pskov.