Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
53
Stalin's Seven Sisters
By the end of your first day in Moscow, you're bound to have noticed at least
one of these sky-scraping, turreted castles to Communism. Seven of them cut
into the city skyline, immediately differentiating the city from any other in the
world. Initiated under Stalin, Moscow's “Seven Sisters” emerged in the 1950s
and came to embody an architectural style dubbed “Stalin Gothic” that was
emulated in buildings throughout the Communist world.
The buildings are immediately recognizable by their tapered towers, glass
spires, and solid stone enormity. Architecturally, they combine features of Rus-
sian 17th-century churches, Western Gothic cathedrals, and American sky-
scrapers of the 1930s. Many were built by German prisoners of war. The
grandest example is the main building of
Moscow State University,
lording
over the city from the peak of Sparrow Hills. Containing 32km (20 miles) of cor-
ridors, this 5,000-room building is best viewed at a distance, ideally from the
lookout platform above the Moscow River. Another impressive sister is the
Kotelnicheskaya apartment building
(1 Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya),
which housed the Communist elite in decades past and now includes some of
the city's priciest real estate, even if its infrastructure is in need of an upgrade.
A second apartment building,
Krasnaya Presnya Tower
at Kudrinskaya
Square, once housed Soviet aviation elite. Two more of the Stalin Gothic build-
ings are hotels (
Hotel Ukraina,
2/1 Kutuzovsky Prospekt; and
Hotel Lenin-
gradskaya,
near the Leningradsky Train Station at 21/40 Kalanchevskaya
Ulitsa). The remaining two are government buildings (the
Foreign Ministry
on
Smolenskaya Sq., and the
Transport Ministry
on the Garden Ring Rd. at Kras-
niye Vorota). Even modern developers have caught the Stalin Gothic bug: The
biggest real estate project in recent years is the
Triumph Palace
apartment
complex in northwest Moscow, one of Europe's tallest structures—you're sure
to spot it on your way in from the airport.
The biggest castle of all—and the one that served as a boilerplate for the oth-
ers—never reached fruition. The
Palace of Soviets
was intended to be the most
elaborate ode to Communist power that Stalin could conceive, planned for the
site of the razed Christ the Savior Cathedral (p. 143). The plans were sabotaged
by infighting and later by World War II, and the site became a public swimming
pool, and remained so until the end of the Soviet era. Today a new cathedral
stands on the site, one so grandiose that some call it an Orthodox version of the
Palace of Soviets. Original designs of the Palace of Soviets are among the exhibits
at
Shchusev Museum of Architecture
at 5/25 Vozdvizhenka Ulitsa (
&
495/291-
2109;
metro: Biblioteka Imeni Lenina; admission 100 rubles. It's open Tuesday to
Friday from 11am to 7pm, Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm.
3
most are now printed in English as well as
Russian. The signs in the stations directing
you to platforms are in Russian, however, so
it helps to know what the name of your
station looks like printed in the Cyrillic
alphabet. The system is slowly expanding
but has not kept up with population growth.
Trains are nearly always crowded, and stops
