The tower was built in the 16th century and reconstructed in 1620. Buttresses with casemates and loopholes were added to it. It got its name due to its proximity to the Church of Boris and Gleb, which unfortunately has not survived. The tower was also called Dukhivskaya because of the nearby Holy Spirit Monastery, which also did not survive.

In 1785, a landslide destroyed the Borisoglebskaya and Zachatyevskaya towers, after which they were dismantled along with the adjacent walls and replaced with shorter ones. In 1833, the wall was rebuilt, and next to the former Borisoglebskaya tower, a Dukhivskaya passage was made.

The remains of the tower, part of the first tier, were discovered in 1966, and in 1974 it was restored to its original place.

In terms of size, the Borisoglebskaya tower is similar to the round Storage and Powder towers. The thickness of the walls and the location of the combat stoves in the walls indicate similarities in the internal layout of the first tier of all three towers. However, unlike the others, the Borisoglebskaya tower is located at the bend of the direction of the adjacent walls, so a combat stove was necessary to eliminate the dead space in the base combat area.

Like other round towers, the Borisoglebskaya had four tiers. The second tier likely repeated the layout of the first and was also covered by a dome vault, mentioned in the 1765 inventory. This determined the height of the tier, limited above by the floor of the third tier, which was at the level of the combat walk of the wall at the tower. Above the combat walk, the cylindrical volume of the tower was cut off by a vertical plane along the line of the wall of the battlements. The third tier had thinner walls and a flat ceiling laid on the cut of the wall between the third and fourth tiers. In the upper combat area, there were 8 large combat windows on the outside and 3 windows on the inner wall. The upper platform was surrounded by 11 battlements, as indicated in the Inventory Book.

The reconstruction of the internal layout and the calculation of the height dimensions of the Borisoglebskaya tower show that it was built analogously to other round towers of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin.