The largest hotel in Europe was built on marshland where the Moskva regularly flooded, in a district nobody considered good.
Position
One of the seven Stalin-era towers. The foundation stone was laid in 1947 for Moscow’s eight-hundredth anniversary, but the boggy Dorogomilovo ground needed the foundations reinforced before building could proceed — the site had been a coachmen’s district that flooded, on the road to Smolensk, and was not thought a prestigious address. Construction ran 1953–57 under Arkady Mordvinov, with Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky — who had studied skyscraper construction in New York — on the stylobate. It opened on 25 May 1957 with 1,026 rooms, the largest hotel in Europe, at 206 metres including a 73-metre spire.
⚑ What was inside it in 1957
Centralised air conditioning with filtration. Its own telephone exchange for ten thousand numbers. And a vacuum system that carried dust through pipes to underground suction stations. For a hotel opened in the Soviet Union in 1957 this is the engineering claim of the entry, and it is why the building belongs in a hospitality register and not only an architectural one.
The name, and what it meant
It was called *Ukraina* when emphasising the fraternal ties between Soviet republics mattered — the thaw, and a period of expectation. The gold letters spelling the old name were kept on the façade when the hotel reopened: the mayor of Moscow asked the new owners to keep the name, and the compromise was that the building keeps it and the business does not.
⚑ What this house shows
Two side wings hold around 250 private flats and always did: it was never only a hotel. Listed in 1987, sold at auction to a private buyer in 2005, rebuilt over five years and reopened in 2010 under an international brand. A Soviet state hotel became a privately owned, internationally branded one without a stone of the outside changing — the continuity is architectural rather than institutional, and the Library records it that way.
Candour
⚑ Sources differ on the reopening: 2010 and 2011 both appear, with 28 April given as the date in one account; the entry follows the 2010 completion and notes the variation. The room count today is not established here. The register’s row for the owning group named this house before the Library held it as a house at all — which is how the gap was found, and the Library records that its own cross-reference was ahead of its own entries.