The tallest building in Moscow is Federation Tower East, known as Vostok, at 373.7 metres with 97 floors, completed in 2017. It stands in the Moscow International Business Center, the cluster of towers usually called Moscow City, on a bend of the Moskva River about four kilometres west of the Kremlin. It is Europe's second tallest building — the Lakhta Center in Saint Petersburg passed it at 462 metres in 2019 — and every one of Moscow's ten tallest buildings is in the same square kilometre.
Moscow City
The Moscow International Business Center was approved in 1992 on a 60-hectare site of derelict stone quarries and industrial land at Presnenskaya Naberezhnaya. The first tower, Tower 2000, opened in 2001, and the district filled in over the following two decades.
It now holds Federation Tower at 373.7 metres, OKO South at 354.2 metres, Neva Towers Tower 2 at 345 metres, Mercury City Tower at 338.8 metres, Eurasia at 308.9 metres, City of Capitals Moscow at 301.6 metres, and several others above 250 metres.
The concentration is extreme. Moscow has essentially no tall buildings anywhere else, so the skyline consists of a single dense cluster visible from across the city and nothing between it and the historic centre.
Europe's Tallest, Then Second
Each of Moscow City's towers held the European height record in turn. Naberezhnaya Tower took it in 2007, City of Capitals in 2009, Mercury City in 2012, OKO in 2015 and Federation Tower in 2017 — five changes in a decade, all within a few hundred metres of each other.
The run ended when Gazprom's Lakhta Center opened in Saint Petersburg in 2019 at 462 metres, taking both the Russian and the European records. Lakhta Center 2, announced at 703 metres, would take it further if built.
Before Moscow City, Europe's tallest building had been the Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt and before that Moscow State University. The record has been Russian continuously since 2003, and before Moscow City the Russian record holder was a Stalin-era building from 1953.
Why the Towers Are All in One Place
Moscow's historic centre is protected by height controls that are among the strictest applied to any large capital. Sightlines to the Kremlin and to the ring of monasteries, along with the general protection of the pre-revolutionary street pattern inside the Garden Ring, keep new construction low.
That policy was reinforced after a period in the 2000s under mayor Yuri Luzhkov in which a series of large developments were approved inside the centre, several of which were widely criticised for demolishing listed buildings. His successor Sergei Sobyanin cancelled a substantial number of approved projects from 2010 onward.
Concentrating the towers on a single brownfield site four kilometres out was the compromise. It gives Moscow a financial district skyline without touching the historic core, and it produces the city's characteristic view: onion domes in the foreground, a wall of glass on the horizon, nothing in between.
Building on the Moskva Bend
The Moscow City site was chosen partly because it was worthless. It had been a limestone quarry, then a stone-processing yard, and its ground conditions were poor enough that no one had wanted it.
Foundations across the district go down 15 to 20 metres to reach competent limestone, through fill and water-bearing sands, and several towers sit on mat slabs several metres thick over bored piles. The Moskva River on three sides of the site complicates dewatering.
Moscow's climate adds a further constraint. Winter temperatures below minus 20 degrees limit concrete placement for months at a time unless the pour is heated and insulated, which is why construction schedules in the district run long and why several towers took over a decade.
Who Occupies Them
Moscow City was planned as a financial district on the model of Canary Wharf or La Défense, and for a decade after 2008 it struggled to fill. Vacancy rates were high, several developers went through restructuring, and a substantial share of the floor space was converted from offices to apartments.
Federation Tower Vostok is a case in point: the upper half is residential rather than commercial. Neva Towers Tower 2 is entirely residential and is the tallest residential building in Europe.
Government agencies took a large share of the remaining office space in the 2010s, with several ministries relocating to the district. That, rather than private financial tenancy, is what eventually filled the towers.
The Seven Sisters
Moscow's older skyline is defined by seven Stalinist towers built between 1947 and 1957, known as the Seven Sisters or the Stalin high-rises. The tallest is the main building of Moscow State University on Sparrow Hills, 240 metres including its spire, which was the tallest building in Europe from 1953 until 1990.
The others are the Hotel Ukraina, the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment apartments, the Kudrinskaya Square building, the Hotel Leningradskaya, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Smolenskaya, and the Red Gates administrative building. They are arranged in a rough ring around the centre, and the intended eighth, the Zaryadye tower, was cancelled after Stalin's death.
They were a response to the New York skyline, explicitly so: Stalin is recorded as complaining that foreign visitors would find Moscow lacking in tall buildings. The style, sometimes called Stalinist Gothic or Socialist Classicism, was copied across the Eastern Bloc — the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw and the Hotel International in Prague are direct descendants.
The Palace of the Soviets
The most ambitious Soviet tower was never built. The Palace of the Soviets, designed by Boris Iofan and approved in 1933, was to reach 415 metres and carry a 100-metre statue of Lenin on top — making it the tallest building in the world, taller than the Empire State Building.
The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was dynamited in 1931 to clear the site. Foundations were laid and the steel frame had started to rise when the German invasion of 1941 halted work; the steel was dismantled and used for fortifications and bridges.
The project was never resumed. The flooded foundation pit became the Moskva open-air swimming pool, the largest in the world, from 1960 to 1994, and the cathedral was rebuilt on the site between 1995 and 2000. The sequence — cathedral, tower, swimming pool, cathedral — is a fair summary of the twentieth century in Moscow.
Federation Tower Itself
Federation Tower is a two-tower complex designed by Sergei Tchoban and Peter Schweger. Vostok, the east tower, reaches 373.7 metres; Zapad, the west tower, is 242 metres. A 448-metre spire was part of the original design and was cancelled in 2011.
Both towers are triangular in plan, tapering as they rise, and are clad in a fritted glass that changes tone with the light. Vostok holds offices in the lower half and apartments above, with an observation deck called Panorama 360 on the 89th floor at 327 metres.
The observation deck holds two Guinness records for the world's highest ice cream factory and highest chocolate factory, both operating on the floor. That is a genuine entry in the record books and not a joke.
A Fire and a Long Construction
Federation Tower took thirteen years. Construction began in 2003, stalled during the 2008 financial crisis, and resumed slowly afterwards. Vostok topped out in 2015 and completed in 2017.
In April 2012 a fire broke out on the upper floors of the unfinished tower and burned across several levels, requiring a large response and drawing considerable attention because of the difficulty of fighting fires at that height. Moscow's fire service does not have equipment reaching much above 100 metres, so supertall buildings rely entirely on internal systems.
The same limitation applies across the district. Moscow City's towers are designed with refuge floors, pressurised stairwells and internal sprinkler systems, and evacuation from the upper floors is planned as a staged process rather than a full building clearance.
What Else Is Tall in Russia
Outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Russia has very few tall buildings. Grozny City in Chechnya has towers of around 145 metres, Yekaterinburg's Iset Tower reaches 209 metres, and nothing else passes 200.
The Ostankino Tower in Moscow, a television tower completed in 1967, is 540.1 metres and was the tallest free-standing structure in the world until the CN Tower passed it in 1975. It is not a building, and it caught fire in August 2000, killing three people and knocking out television across the city.
Russia's construction of supertall buildings has slowed considerably since 2022, with international architects and engineers withdrawing and financing constrained. Several Moscow City plots remain undeveloped.
Getting Around and Getting Up
Moscow City is served by three metro stations — Delovoy Tsentr, Mezhdunarodnaya and Vystavochnaya — plus a stop on the Moscow Central Circle. The district is connected internally by a pedestrian bridge, Bagration, over the river.
Panorama 360 in Federation Tower is the highest observation deck in Europe. The Imperia Tower has a lower one, and several restaurants in the district occupy upper floors.
The best external view of the cluster is from the Sparrow Hills observation point in front of Moscow State University, which looks across the river and puts the Seven Sisters and Moscow City in the same frame — seventy years of Russian skyline in one photograph. For comparison, see the tallest building in Paris and the count of countries in Europe.