[10] At the time, the town belonged to a lateral branch of the Rurikid House of Smolensk, and carried on a lively trade with Narva on the Gulf of Finland.

In 1494, Vyazma was captured by the Grand Duchy of Moscow and turned into a fortress, of which but a single tower remains.

The vanguard of the Russian army under the command of Lieutenant General Mikhail Miloradovich and a Cossack unit of General Matvey Platov (coordinated by Miloradovich) attacked the rearguard corps of Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout east of Vyazma and cut off his retreat.

Owing to the intervention of Eugène de Beauharnais and Józef Poniatowski, Davout managed to break through the Russian army's encirclement.

U.S. journalist Quentin Reynolds, of Collier's Weekly, visited Vyazma shortly after the German withdrawal in 1943 and gave an account of the destruction in his book The Curtain Rises (1944), in which he stated that the town's population was reduced from 60,000 to 716, with only three buildings remaining.

According to the memoirs of the future Soviet historian, Mikhail Markovich Sheinman, who was in German captivity at the time: In early October 1941, near Vyazma, the sector in which I served was surrounded.

In Vyazma, exhausted, ragged, barely clad people – Soviet prisoners of war – the Germans drove to unbearably hard work.

It was not until the end of my stay in Vyazma that bunks were built in the houses, but on them the sick lay without straw, on bare boards.

The burial ground, where tens of thousands of people died in the death camp, is buried in the territory of the existing meat-processing plant, now marked chapel in memory of the dead prisoners of war.

[4] The town's main industries in the present day are engineering, leather working, graphite products, and flax textiles.

Attempts to resurrect the pryanik industry during the Soviet period were unsuccessful, but in post-Soviet times the local Вяземский хлебокомбинат (Vyazma [industrial] bakery) started once again to produce hand-made pryaniki, some of which were awarded prizes in national competitions.

Vyazma is a major railway junction for both freight and passenger transport, with connecting trains from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kaluga, and Bryansk.

The long-distance (lastochka) train from Moscow to Smolensk stops at Vyazma, with travel time to and from the capital being between 2 and 2:30 hours.

Short-distance trains also go to and from Mozhaysk and Borodino, linking Vyazma to the Moscow suburban railway network.

The nearby Vyazma Airport serves military and recreational purposes, but there are no commercial flights to or from the city.