The chronicles say Rurik settled in Novgorod in 862 and founded the dynasty that would rule Russia for seven centuries. His successor Oleg moved the capital to Kiev, but Novgorod kept its independence and grew rich on the trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks: Vikings in longboats sailing south down the Volkhov, across Lake Ilmen, up the Lovat, then portaging to the Dnieper and on to Constantinople. In 1136 Novgorod evicted its prince and made itself a republic, with the veche, a public assembly of citizens, electing officials and making decisions. Pskov was the only other Russian city that worked the same way. Novgorod joined the Hanseatic League and became one of the great trading cities of medieval northern Europe, and by some good fortune the Mongol invasion never reached it. The 11th-through-14th-century churches of Veliky Novgorod still stand because of that absence.

Ivan III brought Novgorod into the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the late 15th century, ending the republic. In 1570, Ivan IV, the Terrible, fearing treason from a city that remembered its independence, sent his oprichnina to sack Novgorod. For weeks his men tortured, drowned, and burned the inhabitants. The number killed is debated but ran into the thousands or possibly tens of thousands, in a city of perhaps 30,000. Novgorod never recovered its old commercial weight. Swedish armies plundered what remained during the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century. By the time Peter the Great's reforms reorganized the Russian state in 1708, Novgorod was a provincial backwater being absorbed into the new Saint Petersburg-centered geography. The 1851 Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway bypassed it entirely, and the towns that grew up along the line, Malaya Vishera, Okulovka, Chudovo, became the new local economic centers.

The German Wehrmacht reached Novgorod in August 1941 and occupied it for two and a half years. The city was systematically destroyed. The 12th-century Saint George Monastery was looted; the Saint Sophia Cathedral, founded in 1045, was damaged; the Millennium of Russia monument unveiled in 1862 was disassembled by German troops to ship to Germany as scrap, and was rescued in pieces only because the Red Army arrived first. Civilian deaths across what is now Novgorod Oblast ran into the tens of thousands; the Demyansk Pocket, where six German divisions held out from February to April 1942, and the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive of January 1944 turned much of the region into killing ground. The Soviet population census of 1989 recorded about 753,000 people in the oblast. The 2021 census recorded 583,000. The wartime demographic wound, especially to the male population, never fully closed.

Geographically the oblast is a low country shading east into the Valdai Hills, with Lake Ilmen at its center fed by the Msta, Lovat, Pola, Polist, and Shelon rivers, and drained northward by the Volkhov toward Lake Ladoga. Lake Seliger, shared with Tver Oblast, is one of the largest in central Russia. Two federally protected areas, Valdaysky National Park and Rdeysky Nature Reserve with its vast Polist-Lovat swamp system, preserve some of the Russian northwest's surviving wild country. The historic monuments of Veliky Novgorod, restored over decades after the war, are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Veliky Novgorod was the city's renaming in 1999, returning the old prefix that means Great. The Hanseatic merchants are long gone. The chronicles, the icons, the onion domes (which Novgorod helped invent), and Onfim's birch bark scribbles remain.