Sukharev Tower: The Will of Peter I

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The tower served as a ceremonial gateway into the city, as well as a marketplace for local vendors.

We leave Moscow’s central district and travel outward along Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, passing the city’s concentric ring roads one by one. At the intersection with the Garden Ring, a metro station bears the name “Sukharevskaya.”

This name references both a man and a vanished structure. The former is Colonel Lavrenti Sukharev, who sided with Tsar Peter the Great during a 1689 coup attempt by the Tsar’s sister Sofia. In gratitude for Sukharev’s actions, Peter I built a triumphal monument to his victory near the site of Sukharev’s former barracks, and named it the Sukharev Tower after the colonel [1].

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In this 1872 painting by artist Alexei Savrasov, the tower looms over surrounding structures.

The tower served both ceremonial and practical functions: Peter used it to house his new Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation, in an attempt to bring Western-style education to the city. Historian Timothy Colton argues that he was “obsessed with molding the country into a modern absolutist empire,” and that he “detested [Moscow]—like many Communists two centuries later—as a distillation of all that was archaic in Russia” [2]. When the Soviets demolished it two centuries later in order to make way for the Garden Ring, they were replacing this earlier legacy of modernization with their own.

While Peter’s social agenda may have become outmoded, his cultural impact remains relevant. The Sukharev Tower was regarded as one of Moscow’s most prominent landmarks, as noted by 19th-century writer Mikhail Lermontov in his essay “A Panorama of Moscow”:

To the north, nearer to the horizon, you can observe the dark silhouette of a fantastic rectangular structure, the Sukharev Tower. With its moss-covered facade, it reigns supreme over the surroundings as if trying to assert the will of its creator, Emperor Peter the Great. The gloomy look, the size and the graphic outline recall the age when nothing could have crossed the tyrannical power of that man [3].

For decades, the tower was seen as a physical reminder of Peter I’s legacy. Its physical prominence and status as a hub of commercial activity helped cement it in the city’s collective memory. After the fall of the USSR, the nearby “Kolkhoznaia” (“Collective Farm”) metro station was renamed “Sukharevskaya,” even though the tower had been destroyed almost eighty years prior [4]. The tower’s continued presence in the symbolic naming of the square’s landmarks speaks to its indelibility in Moscow culture.

  1. Glukhov, Alexei. “The Sukharev Tower, Moscow’s One-Time Historic and Architectural Landmark.” Sputnik News, 24 June 2008. Web: 23 Oct 2016.
  2. Colton, p. 26.
  3. Lermontov, Ivan the Great Bell Tower. Ibid.
  4. Gill, Graeme. "Changing Symbols: The Renovation of Moscow Place Names." Russian Review 64.3 (2005): 480-503. Print.