Imperial Moscow University Ivan Shuvalov and
Mikhail Lomonosov promoted the idea of a university in Moscow, and
Russian Empress Elizabeth decreed its establishment on . The first lectures were given on .
Saint Petersburg State University and MSU each claim to be Russia's oldest university. Though Moscow State University was founded in 1755, St. Petersburg which has had a continuous existence as a "university" since 1819 sees itself as the successor of an academy established on in 1724, by a decree of
Peter the Great. MSU originally occupied the
Principal Medicine Store on
Red Square from 1755 to 1787.
Catherine the Great transferred the university to a building on the other side of Mokhovaya Street, constructed between 1782 and 1793, to a design by
Matvei Kazakov, and rebuilt by
Domenico Giliardi after
fire consumed much of Moscow in 1812. In the 18th century, the university had three departments: philosophy, medicine, and law. A preparatory college was affiliated with the university until its abolition in 1812. In 1779,
Mikhail Kheraskov founded a boarding school for noblemen (Благородный пансион) which in 1830 became a
gymnasium for
Russian nobility. The
university press, run by
Nikolay Novikov in the 1780s, published the newspaper in Imperial Russia:
Moskovskie Vedomosti. In 1804, medical education split into clinical (therapy), surgical, and
obstetrics faculties. Between 1884 and 1897, the Department of Medicine built a medical campus in
Devichye Pole, between the
Garden Ring and
Novodevichy Convent; designed by , with university doctors like
Nikolay Sklifosovskiy and Fyodor Erismann acting as consultants. The campus, and medical education in general, were separated from Moscow University in 1930. Devichye Pole was operated by the independent
I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University and by various other state and private institutions. The roots of student unrest in the university reach deep into the nineteenth century. In 1905, a social-democratic organization emerged at the university and called for the overthrow of the Czarist government and the establishment of a republic in Russia. The
imperial government repeatedly threatened to close the university. In 1911, in a protest over the introduction of troops onto the campus and mistreatment of certain professors, 130 scientists and professors resigned
en masse, including
Nikolay Dimitrievich Zelinskiy,
Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev, and
Sergei Alekseevich Chaplygin; thousands of students were expelled.
Moscow State University 1917–49 After the
October Revolution of 1917, the institution began to admit children of the proletariat and peasantry. In 1919, the university abolished tuition fees, and established a preparatory facility to help working-class children prepare for entrance examinations. During the implementation of
Joseph Stalin's
first five-year plan (1928–32), the university was expanded.
1950–99 In 1970, the university imposed a 2% quota on Jewish students. A 2014 article entitled "Math as a tool of anti-semitism" in
The Mathematics Enthusiast discussed
antisemitism in the Moscow State University's Department of Mathematics during the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1980s, the Dean of MSU's law faculty was dismissed for taking bribes. After 1991, nine new faculties were established. The following year, the university gained a unique status: it is funded directly from the state budget (bypassing the Ministry of Education). On 6 September 1997, French electronic musician
Jean Michel Jarre used the front of the university as the backdrop for a
concert. The concert attracted a paying crowd of half a million people.
2000–2020 In 2007, MSU Rector
Viktor Sadovnichy said that corruption in Russia's education system was a "systemic illness," and that he had seen an ad guaranteeing a perfect score on entrance exams to MSU, for a significant fee. On 19 March 2008, Russia's most powerful
supercomputer to date, the SKIF MSU (;
skif means '
Scythian' in Russian) was launched at the university. Its peak performance of 60
TFLOPS (
LINPACK – 47.170 TFLOPS) made it the fastest supercomputer in the
Commonwealth of Independent States. In November 2012, Mikhail Basharatyan, Deputy Dean of the MSU World Economy Department, was fired for taking a bribe from a pupil. In February 2013, Andrei Andriyanov resigned as head of the
Kolmogorov Special Educational and Scientific Center of the university, after an investigation concluded that he had included fake references in his doctoral thesis.
2020–present In March 2022, Victor Sadovnichy, rector of Moscow State University and president of the Russian Union of Rectors, was the lead signature in a public statement endorsing the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In reaction,
Academia Europaea, a pan-European academy, suspended the membership of Sadovnichy. In response to the Russian invasion, that same month
Yale University, the
Hamburg University of Applied Sciences,
University of Potsdam, and
HKU Business School suspended their longstanding relationships with the university, and the
University of St Andrews suspended a joint master's degree programme with the university.
Intel and
AMD, the largest chip manufacturers in the world, whose processors are used in the Moscow State University
supercomputer, as well as
Nvidia, reacted by suspending deliveries of their processors to Russia. ==Campus==