Moscow in the 17th century.
Moscow is the capital of the Russian Confederation, a successor state of the Russian Empire, and is also the headquarters of the Associated Russian Republics.
Moscow was founded as a small border town of Kievan Rus' in the twelfth century. During the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century Moscow was burned and its people slaughtered. The town was rebuilt, and became one of the principalities of the Grand Duchy of Vladimir. By the fourteenth century, Moscow had become the principal city of the Grand Duchy. The Grand Dukes of Moscow built up their power by acting as the chief tax-collectors for the Mongol Khans and annexing surrounding states. A series of rebellions against Mongol rule in the fifteenth century brought a final end to Moscow's status as a tributary state in 1480.
Grand Duke Ivan III tripled the size of the Grand Duchy during his reign from 1462 to 1505. His son Vasily III, whose mother was the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, began calling himself Tsar, or Emperor, of all the Russian lands, and adopted the imperial double-headed eagle of the Byzantine Empire. Vasily's son Ivan IV also adopted the title Tsar of All Rus', and all subsequent Muscovite rulers used this title until Peter the Great built St. Petersburg as a new capital and revised his title to Tsar of the Russian Empire.
Although St. Petersburg remained the capital of the Russian Empire, Moscow remained the empire's second city. During the Bloody Eighties, a period of rebellion and anarchy that swept Europe in the 1880s, uprisings against the rule of Tsar Nicholas II occurred in both St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1888. This uprising was put down with immense loss of life, but the disasters of the Great Northern War ten years later led to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1900. The Revolution led to the fall of the Russian monarchy, and ultimately to the breakup of the Empire.
Intermittent warfare among the Russian successor states continued for fifty years after the Revolution until the outbreak of an all-out war between Siberia, Ukraine, and the Russian Confederation in 1947. The war ended in 1955 with Siberia under Japanese control and the remaining Russian states under German control. As war between the German Empire and Great Britain loomed in 1965, Germany's Russian client states formed the Associated Russian Republics. However, anti-German rioting broke out in Moscow in 1969, with more disturbances the following year.