Moscow State University

This guide to Moscow State University's Stalinist tower follows the Gulag prisoners who built it in the early 1950s, thousands of them housed in a camp on the building's own twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth floors to save on guards. Among them, the guide follows one craftsman said to have spent months secretly assembling a glider from plywood and wire in the summer of 1952. Listen for the scale of the build itself: over forty thousand tons of steel raised on a hilltop above the Moscow River.