Commanding a highway to the Crimea, the monastery was intended to defend southern approaches to the Moscow Kremlin.

The monastery was built on the spot where Boris Godunov's mobile fortress and Sergii Radonezhsky's field church with Theophan the Greek's icon Our Lady of the Don had been located.

In 1747, the authorities wanted to transfer the Slavic Greek Latin Academy to the Donskoy Monastery, but the cloister confined itself to paying salaries to the academic staff from its own treasury.

In 1812, the French army ransacked the Donskoy Monastery,[3] the most valuable things having been moved to Vologda prior to that.

Over the next ten years full lists were finally compiled of those buried in the monastery graveyard and other locations in and around the Russian capital.

[5] When the monastery was established, Boris Godunov personally laid the foundation stone of its cathedral, consecrated in 1593 to the holy image of Our Lady of the Don.

This diminutive structure, quite typical for Godunov's reign, has a single dome crowning three tiers of zakomara.

The New (or the Great) Cathedral, also dedicated to the Virgin of the Don, was started in 1684 as a votive church of Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna.

After the monastery lost its defensive importance, its walls were reshaped in the red-and-white Muscovite baroque style, reminiscent of the Novodevichy Convent.

The old necropolis in the south-eastern part of the monastery is remarkable for its ornate tombs, executed by some of the best Russian sculptors.

They mark the graves of the poets Mikhail Kheraskov and Alexander Sumarokov, the philosophers Pyotr Chaadaev and Ivan Ilyin, the historians Mikhail Shcherbatov and Vasily Klyuchevsky, the critic Vladimir Odoyevsky, the architect Osip Bove, the painter Vasily Perov, the courtier Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov, the notorious murderer Daria Saltykova, and the aviator Nikolay Zhukovsky.

It contains three mass graves of the cremated ashes of executed political prisoners from Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.