Napoleon kept the promise to blow up the Moscow Kremlin, destroying the Kremlin's walls and towers before retreating with his army, beginning a decline in his power that would lead to his abdication and exile just two years later.
The BBC's Steve Rosenberg in Moscow says the Kremlin may have wanted the new holiday to boost patriotism, but in Moscow it risked becoming a day of nationalist fervour.
BBC: Some far-right demonstrators in Moscow gave Nazi salutes
Kremlin rigging of the second Khodorkovsky trial, the corruption smothering daily lives of ordinary citizens, the closing of clogged Moscow streets for Kremlin elite, and the scorn of internet bloggers, such as Alexei Navalny, have made Putin a despised and farcical figure.
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When integrated with many older SA-5 SAMs, a number of large missile-detection and -tracking radars and an up-to- date ABM complex around Moscow, the Kremlin is in the enviable position of denouncing our prospective national missile defense system while preserving (in fact, while modernizing) its own extant one.
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Just across the Moscow River from the Kremlin stands the House on the Embankment.
Western ambassadors should not hesitate to talk to opposition protesters in Moscow just because the Kremlin objects.
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Britain has sought his extradition from Moscow, but the Kremlin is holding fast against the request, saying that extraditing nationals is against its constitution.
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MOSCOW The Kremlin's recent halt to adoptions to the U.S. has opened a rancorous debate that extends beyond the country's orphans to the tens of thousands of other children who have been separated from their living parents and sent to state orphanages.
Rose Gottemoeller of the Moscow Carnegie Center says the Kremlin is worried about having a new nuclear power on its doorstep.
Syria has emerged as a flash point between Washington and Moscow, due to the Kremlin's continuing financial and military support for Mr. Assad.
But when Cyprus leaders flew into Moscow for support, they found the Kremlin unwilling to help.
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The Kremlin and Chechnya's Moscow-appointed administration portrayed the referendum as a key step toward peace and a return to normal life in the region.
" Just months prior, while referring to Chavez's late July visit to Russia, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin expressed similar sentiments emanating from the Kremlin as he told the Moscow-based news agency Interfax that the "two countries' positions on most international issues are similar or identical.
Jenson Button reckons it would be a good idea to hold a grand prix in Moscow after he drove a McLaren round the Kremlin in a demonstration event last weekend.
Lee has accumulated irrefutable, unclassified evidence of a dirty little secret: Those responsible for designing and deploying the Kremlin's ABM system around Moscow (which was allowed under the 1972 ABM Treaty) were under orders to use its radars and 8, 000-10, 000 surface-to-air interceptors to assemble an illegal nation-wide missile defense.
Most of the Kremlin's efforts were focused on Moscow, where an exit poll suggested that United Russia had won less than 30% support.
The kindest verdict on his time in Moscow is that, given the notorious corruption of Kremlin politics, Mr Putin emerged without visibly dirty hands.
Before Putin's election, the banking and media tycoon had helped finance the Kremlin's main opponents, powerful Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and his partner, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov.
Yet, a Kremlin spokesman has already served notice that Moscow will feel free to abrogate the START follow-on treaty if it believes that U.S. missile defenses in Europe are a threat to its deterrent.
At particular issue is the Kremlin's taxing authority: Will Moscow center retain its ability to skim off from the republics those revenues essential to maintaining the USSR's bloated military sector, its overseas empire and its technology theft and espionage activities (both of which are on the rise)?
In a sign of the Kremlin's nervousness, riot police from Moscow have been sent to deal with the trouble.
Running down the value of stocks of SOEs like Gazprom and Lukoil, that amount to corporate power-projection instruments for the Kremlin, would significantly increase the costs to Moscow of its efforts to snuff democratic governments allied with the United States.
The BBC's Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg says there is no indication that the Kremlin is directly involved in any of these incidents.
But, though he ran Azerbaijan for 13 years from 1969 as a loyal Marxist acolyte of the Kremlin, before going on to bigger things in Moscow, times are changing.
In a different way, the far east may also realise the Kremlin's prophecy and drift farther from Moscow.
On April 1st an opposition candidate in Yaroslavl, an ancient city north-east of Moscow, won a landslide victory in a mayoral election against a Kremlin nominee.
This has provoked the Kremlin, which accuses America of using its aid agency in Moscow to influence Russian politics.
He has been largely an absentee ruler, chairing meetings in the Kremlin but spending weeks on end in his country house outside Moscow.
The recent murder of an ethnic Russian football fan in Moscow by north Caucasians sparked violent riots by ultranationalists and skinheads near the Kremlin.
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