Rossiya Hotel

The Rossiya Hotel (Russian: Гостиница «Россия») was a five-star international hotel built in Moscow from 1964 until 1967 at the order of the Soviet government. Construction used the existing foundations of a cancelled skyscraper project, the Zaryadye Administrative Building, which would have been the eighth of what are now referred to as the "Seven Sisters". The architect was Dmitry Chechulin.

Large portions of a historic district of Moscow, known as Zaryadye, were demolished in the 1940s for the original project. It was registered in The Guinness Book of Records as the largest hotel in the world until it was surpassed by the Excalibur in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1990. It remained the largest hotel in Europe until its 2006 closure.

The 21-story Rossiya had 3,000 rooms, 245 half suites, a post office, a health club, a nightclub, a movie theater, the Zaryadye, and a barber shop, a police station with jail cells behind unmarked black doors near the barber shop, and the 2500-seat State Central Concert Hall. The building could accommodate over 4,000 guests. Most of the rooms were 11 square metres (120 sq ft). The hotel was adjacent to Red Square, its 21-story tower looming over the Kremlin walls and the cupolas of Saint Basil's Cathedral.

Fire

On February 25, 1977, a major fire in the building killed 42 and injured 50. The high death and injury rate was exacerbated because the hotel had very few exits, a design intended to make it difficult for guests to enter or exit unseen by the hotel staff.

Demolition

The Rossiya Hotel closed on January 1, 2006. Demolition of the building began in March 2006 for a planned entertainment complex which would have been loosely based on the design of the old Zaryadye district. The project was to be overseen by British architect Sir Norman Foster and would have included a new, two thousand room hotel with apartments and a parking garage. In October 2006, the Supreme Arbitration Court cancelled the results of a tender to reconstruct the Rossiya hotel near the Kremlin. The hotel's site remained vacant until 2013, when it was announced that Zaryadye Park would be developed there. The park opened in November 2017.

Text imported from Wikipedia article "Rossiya Hotel" and modified on July 23, 2019 according to the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.