MOSCOW: More than 25,000 people congregate at the FIFA fanfest at Sparrow Hills in Moscow, every day of the World Cup. With stalls selling food and beer, photo stations, games and souvenir shops, it looks more like a music festival than anything else, except instead of the stage with bands playing, there is a giant screen with the football on. Once the match starts, that screen is the centre of all attention, every twist and turn it broadcasts dictating every whimper that comes out of the crowd. Behind it, cloaked in neglect, stands a towering structure with more than a few demons in its closet.
Few fans would realise it — justifiably so, for it is hardly something that FIFA would widely advertise — but the main building of the Moscow State University, whose grounds host the biggest party in all of Moscow during the World Cup was built by inmates of Stalin’s infamous prisoner camps — the gulags. The 790-feet tall building is the tallest of Stalin’s Seven Sisters — the seven identically designed towers that the Soviet dictator commissioned to rival the skyscrapers in the Western world.
When it was completed in 1953, it was an architectural wonder — the tallest building in Europe until 1988. And for the workforce required for such a monumental construction effort, Stalin did not have to look further than his brutal forced labour camps that housed every kind of detainee, from petty criminals to political prisoners.
There are a number of works dealing with Soviet history that talk of this. Labour Camp Socialism by Galina Mikhailovna says: “The chief of the Glavpromstroi (one of the government bodies that ran the prison camps), hero of socialist labour, AN Komarovskii managed the construction of the Moscow State University which also used prison labour.”
An article by Igor Aksyuta in 2013 takes a more detailed look at its construction. “According to the university, at the end of 1948, the Ministry of Internal Affairs ordered the early release of several thousand Gulag prisoners who were trained construction workers,” he writes. “They were ordered to serve the rest of their sentence on parole in Moscow, working on this project.”According to the various accounts of its construction, the officials decided that the prisoners had to be housed nearby as the building neared completion and built a temporary camp of sorts on the 24th and 25th floors. It was as secure as a prison camp could be — there was simply nowhere to go. Yet, it seems they underestimated the instinctual craving that man has for freedom.
There are a number of stories about prisoners who attempted escape and myths about some who even succeeded. One talks of a craftsman who fashioned a glider out of wood and attempted to fly his way out of his cage. Another one is about two prisoners who crafted makeshift wings. The story goes that one was shot by the guards while in flight. The other apparently managed to escape making his landing down the hill, at another one of the World Cup’s most important sites — the Luzhniki Stadium which will host the final.
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com