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Moscow state university

The height of building is 182 m, with spire - 240 m. It was under construction from 1949 to 1953. The architect is L, V. Rudnev. Metro station «University»: Vorobyevy Gory, MSI). This building is the first presented to be in the list because it is the highest among the high buildings and substantially reflects the style of that epoch.

Solemn ceremony of laying the first stone of the high building of MSU took place on April 12,1949, exactly 12 years before the space flight of Gagarin.

The main building of MSU was the first among the many records. The height of the 36-storeys high building reaches 240 meters. For the steel structure of the building 40,000 tons of steel were used. And in order to mount the walls and parapets about 175,000,000 bricks were used. The spire is 58 m in high, and the star crowning it has 12 tons in weight.

In one of side towers the champion clock is placed - the biggest in Moscow. Dial plates are made of stainless steel and are 9 m in diam-eter. The minute hand is 4.1m in length and has 39 kg in weight. The Main Building of the University is also the record holder as per the number of pillars, it's practically impossible to count them. The university building, or the «temple of science*, was opened on September 1,1953.

In the initial plans of the building it was supposed to install the statue of Lomonosov instead of the spire by analogy with the planned Palace of Soviets. The figure could be 35-40 m high, but it would give to the building an appearance of gigantic pedestal for small sculpture. Therefore it was demounted from above, decreased in scale, the pose was changed and it was placed to the fountains where today's students usually celebrate the termination of session. And the building receiving in substitution the spire of 58 m in high has only gained from it.

Some more secrets are related to the fountains. On the initial plans there were no trace of fountains and what we can see now are the air inlets, a part of ventilation system of the Main Building, rather than fountains. According to rumors there is a secret entrance in the region of the fountains: through this entrance you can come down to the secret line of Metro-2, one of the stations of which is right under the main building.

Also according to rumors the stations of secret metro are practically under all the high buildings, and the metro line starts from the Kremlin walls and ends either in the airport, or in the woodland. The fragments of the metro scheme were even published in one of the leading newspapers in the middle of the 1990s, and today you can even find it in Internet.

And according to other version, it is asserted that on one the of storeys the cooling plant is placed which protects the foundation from the underground waters, and that if the plant stops to function in some time the building will just have slipped down to the river. The entrance for curious visitors is restricted not only to the basements.