One of Stalin's Seven Sisters: Kudrinskaya Skyscraper

It is hard to ignore the massive gray building that looms into the sky on Kudrinskaya Ploshchad, near metro Krasnopresnenskaya on Moscow's Garden Ring road.? 




One of the seven Stalinist skyscrapers known as "vysotki" and dotted around the city, the Kudrinskaya Ploshchad example is one of only two wholly residential vysotki, along with the building on Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya near the Kremlin. The one at Krasniye Vorota is only partially residential.? 





The Kudrinskaya Ploshchad building housed high-ranking cultural figures in Soviet times, and a couple of floors were reportedly used by the KGB to spy on the nearby U.S. Embassy.? 





These photos show the building in 1991 and in the modern age. Grand shops with huge chandeliers were built at the base of the building — one can be seen in the bottom-right in 1991, to the left the same area as a restaurant in 2008, and today as a sportswear shop.? 





The building was touched up in the early 1990s, and one of its impressive statues is seen here, cast in a net as works went on back then, and again this year after a more recent restoration.