The Moscow Skyscraper

For more than 50 years, the Moscow Skyscraper, this “unsinkable Titanic”, has been a metaphor for Russia and its vast people. It was after the victory over Nazi Germany that Stalin launched the project of the Skyscraper. And barely a few months before he died, the skyscraper’s first inhabitants moved into their new homes. They were all members of the Nomenklatura: KGB officers, military personnel, poets, ballerinas, actors, theatre people… Fifty years later, some still live there. Others bequeathed their apartment to their descendants, who live alongside the new Russians, whose fortunes were made in a matter of months.