Moscow State University's Stalinist tower was Europe's tallest building until 1990
The main building of Moscow State University rises 240 metres and 36 storeys on Sparrow Hills. Built on Stalin's orders as one of seven tiered towers, partly with Gulag labour, it held the title of Europe's tallest building until 1990. In 1997 half a million people paid to watch Jean Michel Jarre use it as a concert backdrop.
Mikhail Lomonosov and Ivan Shuvalov championed a university for Moscow, and Empress Elizabeth decreed it into existence in January 1755; lectures began that spring. Whether it is Russia's oldest is disputed. Saint Petersburg has been a university continuously only since 1819, but it claims descent from an academy that Peter the Great established in 1724. Moscow's first home was a former pharmacy building on Red Square, used until 1787, after which Catherine the Great moved it across Mokhovaya Street into a building by Matvei Kazakov, rebuilt after the great fire of 1812.
Early on there were only three departments: philosophy, medicine and law. In the 1780s the university press, run by Nikolay Novikov, published the newspaper Moskovskie Vedomosti. Medicine later grew into its own campus at Devichye Pole, built between 1884 and 1897, before medical teaching was split off entirely in 1930.
Politics repeatedly reached the lecture halls. A social-democratic group formed there in 1905 calling for a republic, and the tsarist government threatened closure more than once. In 1911, protesting troops on campus and the treatment of colleagues, 130 scientists and professors resigned together, among them the physicist Pyotr Lebedev, and thousands of students were expelled. After 1917 the university opened to workers' and peasants' children, dropping tuition in 1919. Later decades had darker chapters, including a 2% quota on Jewish students imposed in 1970.
Most faculties moved to Sparrow Hills in 1953. Since 1992 the university has been funded straight from the state budget, bypassing the education ministry. In March 2008 it launched SKIF MSU, then the fastest supercomputer in the former Soviet states at a peak of 60 teraflops. Alumni include Anton Chekhov, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Gorbachev, Andrey Kolmogorov and Andrei Sakharov, and more than 40,000 undergraduates study there.
Source: Moscow State University
