The monastery was founded ca. 1380 by the order of the Knyaz Dmitri Donskoi and was named after Saint Nicholas, who, as the legend says, Knyaz saw in the dream, in time of preparing for the long campaign against Mamai horde. In an effort to fight children homelessness, monastery was partially destroyed and reorganised into a children labour colony in 1920; it was later transformed into a labour commune by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Reopened as a Russian Orthodox church institution in 1991 and considered to be the center of Saint Nicholas worship in Moscow oblast.