Moscow State University

• 1. Introduction

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  Moscow State University bears the name of Mikhail Lomonosov, the eighteenth-century scientist who lobbied alongside Ivan Shuvalov for its very existence. Russian Empress Elizabeth granted their wish, decreeing the university's establishment in 1755. That founding date sits at the heart of a long-running dispute: Saint Petersburg State University argues it descends from an academy Peter the Great established in 1724, while Moscow insists seniority belongs to it. The argument has never been settled to both parties' satisfaction.

  What is not in dispute is the scale of what grew from that decree. Today the university runs 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, and 15 research institutes. Its alumni include writers Anton Chekhov, Boris Pasternak, and Ivan Turgenev, as well as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and physicist Andrei Sakharov. By 2019-13 Nobel laureates, 6 Fields Medal winners, and 1 Turing Award winner had passed through its halls.

  Yet the institution's story is not simply one of scholarly glory. It is also a story of student uprisings, antisemitic quotas, corruption scandals, a supercomputer caught in geopolitical crossfire, and a concert crowd of half a million people gathered on its front steps. The questions worth asking are not just how Moscow State University became great, but what happens inside a powerful institution when the state that funds it turns its power against its own people.

• 2. A Building That Survived Fire

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  From 1755 to 1787, the university occupied the Principal Medicine Store on Red Square. Catherine the Great then moved it to a building on Mokhovaya Street, designed by Matvei Kazakov and constructed between 1782 and 1793. When Napoleon's forces swept through Moscow in 1812, fire consumed much of the city. Domenico Giliardi rebuilt the Mokhovaya building in the aftermath, and the university carried on.

  The eighteenth-century institution was far smaller in scope than what exists today. It held three departments: philosophy, medicine, and law. A preparatory college ran alongside it until 1812, the same year the fire forced reconstruction. In 1779, a boarding school for noblemen was founded by Mikhail Kheraskov; by 1830 it had become a gymnasium for Russian nobility.

  The university press, managed by Nikolay Novikov in the 1780s, published Moskovskie Vedomosti, the newspaper of Imperial Russia. That press gave the institution an influence that extended beyond lecture halls. By 1804, medical education had grown complex enough to split into three strands: clinical therapy, surgery, and obstetrics. Between 1884 and 1897, a full medical campus rose at Devichye Pole, between the Garden Ring and Novodevichy Convent, with physicians Nikolay Sklifosovskiy and Fyodor Erismann serving as consultants on its design. That campus was eventually separated from Moscow University in 1930 and became the independent I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University.

• 3. Professors Who Walked Out

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  In 1905, a social-democratic organization formed inside the university and publicly called for the end of Czarist rule and the creation of a republic. The imperial government threatened to close the institution. Six years later, in 1911, the confrontation reached its peak. When troops were marched onto campus and certain professors were mistreated, 130 scientists and faculty members resigned together. Among them were Nikolay Dimitrievich Zelinskiy, Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev, and Sergei Alekseevich Chaplygin. Thousands of students were expelled alongside them.

  After the October Revolution of 1917, the character of the student body changed by design. The new government opened enrollment to children of the proletariat and peasantry, and in 1919 abolished tuition fees entirely. A preparatory facility was set up to help working-class applicants prepare for entrance examinations. During Joseph Stalin's first five-year plan, which ran from 1928 to 1932, the university expanded considerably.

  The campus that most people associate with Moscow State University today took shape in the post-war era. Stalin ordered seven tiered neoclassical towers to be built around Moscow, and the main university building on Sparrow Hills, in southwest Moscow, was one of them. Built with Gulag labour, as were many of Stalin's large construction projects, the central tower rose to 240 metres over 36 stories. When it was completed in 1953, it held the title of tallest building in Europe, a distinction it kept until 1990.

• 4. Quotas, Bribes, and Fake Degrees

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  In 1970, Moscow State University imposed a 2 percent quota limiting the enrollment of Jewish students. A 2014 article in The Mathematics Enthusiast examined how antisemitism in the university's Department of Mathematics persisted through the 1970s and 1980s. The quota was part of a broader pattern in which the institution's formal prestige coexisted with policies that contradicted its scholarly mission.

  Corruption ran alongside academic discrimination. In the mid-1980s, the Dean of the law faculty was dismissed for taking bribes. In October 2012, a criminal case was opened against Mikhail Basharatyan, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of World Politics, and Viktor Baris of the Academy of Labor and Social Relations. A young man had approached police after being told he could secure postgraduate admission and a successful PhD defense, at Moscow State University, for 30,000 euros. On the 30th of October, as planned, Basharatyan and Baris received one million rubles. They were caught in the act.

  The case was brought to court in 2014. It was not isolated. According to the Dissernet online expert community, by 2014 Moscow State University had become one of Russia's largest producers of fake dissertations. Community experts identified the Faculty of Public Administration, led by V. A. Nikonov, and the Faculty of Sociology, led by V. I. Dobrenkov, as the primary sources. By the 19th of December 2020, Dissernet data placed the university fourth among Russian institutions in the number of employees found guilty of academic dishonesty, with 232 cases recorded. In February 2013, separately, Andrei Andriyanov had already resigned as head of the Kolmogorov Special Educational and Scientific Center after investigators concluded he had included fabricated references in his doctoral thesis.

• 5. Half a Million on the Steps

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  On the 6th of September 1997, French electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre performed a concert using the front of the university as his stage backdrop. A paying crowd of half a million people attended. The scale of the event measured something real about the building's hold on Moscow's imagination. The main building on Sparrow Hills is not just a university; it is one of the city's defining skyline features, visible from much of southwest Moscow.

  By 2007, Rector Viktor Sadovnichy was speaking publicly about corruption in Russia's education system, calling it a "systemic illness." He told reporters he had personally seen an advertisement guaranteeing a perfect score on the university's entrance examinations, for a fee. The rector's candor on that front sat uneasily alongside the institution's own record of academic dishonesty.

  On the 19th of March 2008, Moscow State University launched Russia's most powerful supercomputer at the time, the SKIF MSU. The machine's name derives from "Scythian" in Russian. At peak performance, it reached 60 TFLOPS, with a LINPACK score of 47.170 TFLOPS, making it the fastest supercomputer in the Commonwealth of Independent States. That record would become relevant in ways no one anticipated when, in March 2022, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia all suspended deliveries of their processors to Russia.

• 6. War and Suspension

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  In March 2022, Rector Viktor Sadovnichy signed a public statement endorsing Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He led the statement as president of the Russian Union of Rectors. The reaction was swift and institutional. Academia Europaea, the pan-European academy, suspended Sadovnichy's membership.

  A cluster of universities severed ties with Moscow State University in the same month: Yale University, the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, the University of Potsdam, and HKU Business School all ended longstanding partnerships. The University of St Andrews suspended a joint master's degree program it had been running with the institution.

  The SKIF MSU supercomputer, launched just fourteen years earlier as a point of national scientific pride, became collateral damage. Intel and AMD, described in coverage as the world's largest chip manufacturers, supply the processors the machine depends on. Nvidia was also named. All three companies stopped delivering processors to Russia. In the QS World University Rankings for 2026, the university placed 105th. The Academic Ranking of World Universities for 2024 placed it in the 101st-to-150th band. The institution that once resigned 130 of its own professors in protest against state overreach now found its rector at the front of a statement endorsing military action, and its international standing paying a measurable price.