Housed in the original wooden Ivan the Great Bell Tower in the Moscow Kremlin, it crashed to the ground in a fire in the mid-17th century and was broken to pieces.

[citation needed] After becoming Empress, Anna ordered that the pieces be cast into a new bell with its weight increased by another hundred tons, and dispatched the son of Field Marshal Münnich to Paris to solicit technical help from the master craftsmen there.

In 1733, the job was assigned to local foundry masters, Ivan Motorin and his son Mikhail, based on their experience in casting a bronze cannon.

[citation needed] A pit 10 metres (33 ft) deep was dug (near the location of the present bell), with a clay form, and walls reinforced with rammed earth to withstand the pressure of the molten metal.

The fire spread to the temporary wooden support structure for the bell, and fearing damage, guards threw cold water on it, causing eleven cracks, and a huge 10,432.6 kilograms (23,000 lb) slab to break off.

Napoleon Bonaparte, during his occupation of Moscow in 1812, considered removing it as a trophy to France, but was unable to do so, due to its size and weight.

[citation needed] It was finally successfully raised in the summer of 1836 by the French architect Auguste de Montferrand and placed on a stone pedestal.

At the request of the Minister of Culture of the USSR and in accordance with the instructions of the Minister of Defense of the USSR, the Military Academy named after F. E. Dzerzhinsky (now Peter the Great Military Academy of the Strategic Missile Forces) was commissioned in 1986 to carry out a complex of works on the restoration and preservation of the Tsar Bell.

However, as a result of restructuring during Perestroika, further assessment of the bell was deprioritized; the discussion and coordination of issues surrounding its preservation have since been delayed.

For a reliable assessment of the condition of the Tsar Bell in the future, it is necessary to periodically conduct a procedure for diagnosing the possible growth of cracks in its walls by non-destructive testing methods.

[8] For the first public performance, a stack of twelve speakers installed below the campanile on the UC Berkeley campus played the digital simulation of the Tsar Bell.

[9] The American disk jockey DJ Spooky composed New Forms (2016), a duet for carillon and the reproduction of the Tsar Bell.