To the present-day observer, standing on the mansion-lined embankment overlooking the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers, or wandering through the restored and freshly painted central streets of the city, Nizhnii Novgorod does not look so different from the provincial town it was a century ago. The massive automobile factory, the military installations and large-scale industry of the Soviet city of Gorky – all of which closed the area to foreigners until 1991 – sprouted around the edges while leaving the city centre intact. Only the cupolas which once studded the streets like points of gold have vanished, victims of the 1929 eradication of churches. Nizhnii Novgorod boasts all the features of the most lovely of Russian provincial towns: perched picturesquely atop a network of ravines, it nevertheless follows a strictly Petersburgian layout with the three straight avenues radiating from the central kremlin. The above mentioned observer can walk to the edge of the promenade to look out over the Oka at the old fairgrounds and the massive nineteenth-century Alexander Nevsky cathedral on the promontory. Across the Volga, in the meantime, forests still stretch north as far as one can see, past the pilgrimage site of Lake Svetloiar, whose depths conceal the lost city of Kitezh, and the historical refuge of the Old Belief.

Topography

The comfortable provincial ease with which Nizhnii Novgorod straddles bluffs and ravines was in fact the product of a concerted effort involving the central government, local authorities and the town population itself. The history of urban planning for Nizhnii Novgorod as for many Russian cities begins with Catherine the Great’s 1785 Charter to the Towns, which not only bestowed certain privileges upon town dwellers, but converted frontier outposts and administrative centres into ‘proper’ imperial cities with regular street plans and municipal institutions.