Luzhniki Stadium

On 23 December 1954 the government of the USSR adopted a resolution on the construction of a stadium in the Luzhniki area of Moscow, the flood meadows in the bend of the Moskva River whose name translates roughly as "The Meadows". The decision was a response to a specific international situation: by the early 1950s Soviet athletes had taken to the world stage for the first time since the Second World War, and the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki brought the Soviet team 71 medals, 22 of them gold, and second place in the unofficial team standings. Athletic development was a matter of state policy, and the new complex was to meet international standards while serving both as a training base for the Olympic team and as an arena for large domestic and international competitions. One of the architects recalled climbing, on a sunny spring day in 1954, onto a large paved area on the Lenin Hills with the group tasked with designing the central stadium, and wrote that "the proximity of the river, green mass of clean, fresh air" alone settled the choice of ground.

Design began in January 1955 and was completed in 90 days by the architects Alexander Vlasov, Igor Rozhin, Nikolai Ullas and Alexander Khryakov with the engineers Vsevolod Nasonov, Nikolai Reznikov and Vasily Polikarpov. Building started in April 1955 under the supervision of Yekaterina Furtseva, first secretary of the Moscow city committee of the Communist Party. Materials came from across the Union, from Leningrad and the Armenian SSR, oak beams for the spectator benches from the Ukrainian SSR, glass from Minsk and larch lumber from Irkutsk in Siberia. A whole area of dilapidated buildings was demolished, the Trinity Church among them, and eight thousand people were moved into new homes; accounts of the eighteenth-century Tikhvin Church differ, one holding that it was moved and another that it went under the demolition. Because the soil was heavily waterlogged, almost the entire foundation area had to be raised half a metre, 10,000 piles were hammered into the ground and some three million cubic metres of soil were shifted across a site of 160 hectares.

The stadium went up in 450 days and opened on 31 July 1956 with a friendly football match between the RSFSR and China, welcomed by 100,000 spectators. The only goal against the Chinese side was scored by Vadim Redkin, forward for the RSFSR team and for Kuibyshev's Krylia Sovetov, and a memorial plaque at Luzhniki carries his name. Wooden benches gave about 101,000 places at that point. It was the first large-scale Soviet public complex built to the principles of rationalism and of the campaign against architectural excess proclaimed by Nikita Khrushchev. That summer the complex staged the first Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR and, a year later, the sixth World Festival of Youth and Students. Lenin's name belonged to the whole sports complex rather than to the arena alone, and in 1960 a bronze statue of Lenin by the sculptor Matvei Manizer, made for Expo 58 in Brussels, was placed on the square in front of the main entrance.

When Luzhniki held the final of the 1957 Ice Hockey World Championship between Sweden and the Soviet Union, the crowd of 55,000 set a world record for the time. On 10, 11 and 12 June 1958 the first motorcycle speedway races to be held in the Soviet Union ran at the stadium, though it became better known for ice speedway, hosting the final of the Individual Ice Speedway World Championship in 1966, 1967 and 1975. On 23 May 1963 Fidel Castro made a speech at Luzhniki during a visit to the Soviet Union that ran to 38 days.

The arena carried a steady programme of championship sport: the World Modern Pentathlon Championship in 1961 and again in 1974, the World Speed Skating Championship in 1962, the Summer Universiade in 1973 and the seventh Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR in 1979. Its field served for many years as the home ground of the Moscow rivals Spartak and CSKA. From 1973 football matches were announced by Valentin Valentinov, a pupil of Yuri Levitan known as the voice of Luzhniki.

In 1976–1979 the sports complex was repaired for the first time in readiness for the Games. Four floodlight masts were erected, the lamps having previously sat on the upper part of the stands, an Olympic torch and new scoreboards were installed, and rooms for judges, a press centre and facilities for athletes were fitted beneath the arena, with the capacity of the stands reduced in the process. Luzhniki was the chief venue of the 1980 Summer Olympics, taking the opening and closing ceremonies, the athletics, the football finals and the individual jumping grand prix.

The Games of the XXII Olympiad opened on 19 July 1980, the national teams passing one after another along the running track in the march of greeting. Lord Killanin, president of the Olympic committee, thanked the athletes who had come despite the boycott, and Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, declared the Games open. More than 16,000 athletes, amateur performers and professional artists took part in a ceremony lasting about three hours.

The closing ceremony followed on 3 August. The white Olympic flag was lowered to the Olympic anthem and the flame in the cauldron died down, and Misha, the bear symbol of the 1980 Games, appeared on the backdrop of coloured boards with the words "Good journey!" and a tear rolling from his eye. At the close a huge Misha rose over the stadium on coloured balloons to "Goodbye, Moscow" by the composer Alexandra Pakhmutova and the poet Nikolai Dobronravov, sung by Lev Leshchenko and Tatyana Antsiferova, until it vanished into the Moscow night sky.

On 20 October 1982 disaster struck during a UEFA Cup match between FC Spartak Moscow and HFC Haarlem. Sixty-six people died in the crowd crush. It was Russia's worst sporting disaster and, at the time, its most infamous cover-up.

The stadium carried on as a state showcase. It held the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Friendship Games and, that same year, another final of the Individual Ice Speedway World Championship; the twelfth World Festival of Youth and Students followed in 1985 and the opening ceremony of the Goodwill Games in 1986. Foreign performers began to arrive during perestroika: the Moscow Music Peace Festival of 12 and 13 August 1989, with Bon Jovi, Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne, Skid Row and Gorky Park among the acts, drew 120,000 people over two days, and on 24 June 1990 Kino played their last concert before a crowd of 72,000. In the spring of 1992 the state enterprise including the sports complex was privatised and renamed the Luzhniki Olympic Complex, and by June of that year Lenin's name had been removed. A clothing market operated on the Luzhniki grounds beside the arena through the 1990s and closed for good only in 2011. Michael Jackson gave his first performance in Russia at the stadium on 15 September 1993, and the Rolling Stones played there for the first time on 11 August 1998.

A large reconstruction in 1996–1997 put a permanent roof over the stands, refurbished the seating areas and the running surfaces and fitted new plastic seats, reducing the number of places. On 18 August 1997 Russia met a FIFA team at the ground in honour of the 850th anniversary of Moscow and the centenary of Russian football, and in 1998 UEFA placed Luzhniki on its list of five-star European football stadiums. The 1999 UEFA Cup final, in which Parma defeated Marseille, was the second such final to be played as a single fixture. On 21 May 2008 the stadium held the first UEFA Champions League final staged in Russia, Manchester United beating Chelsea on penalties after a 1–1 draw in the first all-English final, a third European Cup and a third final appearance for United and a first for Chelsea; the match passed without incident, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Moscow calling the "security and logistical arrangements put in place by the Russian authorities" first-rate, and UEFA gave the ground elite status. The last football match before the rebuild was played on 10 May 2013 between Spartak and Krylia Sovetov; new running tracks and a natural grass pitch were laid for the World Athletics Championships held that August, and the ground also staged the Rugby World Cup Sevens in 2013 before closing.

The arena closed in 2013, with the company Mosinzhproekt appointed to manage the design and reconstruction. Demolishing the stadium outright for a 90,000-seat replacement was considered, but the decision went to renewing and enlarging the existing building while keeping its historic appearance. The design team was led by Sergey Kuznetsov, chief architect of Moscow, and a separate competition for the architect of the reconstruction was won by the SPEECH bureau under Sergey Tchoban. Work ran through 2013 to 2016: the old stands, rooms and foundations were taken down while the facade and the 14,000-tonne roof were kept and the walls cleaned and repaired, with Artemy Lebedev's studio designing a frieze of athletes in movement styled after the painting of Greek vases. The running track and the athletics area were removed, leaving a ground for football alone. The cost of the works was put at 24 billion roubles by one account and at 26.6 billion by Andrey Bochkaryov, head of Moscow's construction department.

The rebuilt stadium opened on 11 November 2017 with Russia losing 1–0 to Argentina, whose party included Lionel Messi, Ángel Di María, Javier Mascherano and Paulo Dybala; the sports minister Vitaly Mutko noted that Messi's participation was provided for by contract. Tickets had gone on sale on 25 October and 30,000 were sold within two days, and journalists put the crowd at about 77,000. After the final whistle the upper tier was held back for more than forty minutes, and the commentator Dmitry Guberniev voiced concern about the organisation of the coming World Cup; the actions of the police left spectators leaving the ground in a crush and walking more than three kilometres to the nearest open metro station. For the 2018 tournament the stadium took seven matches, four in the group stage, one in the round of sixteen, one semi-final and the final on 15 July 2018. Six checkpoints with 39 inspection lanes and seven pedestrian entry points were organised, about 900 scanners and 3,000 cameras installed, and special places provided for supporters with disabilities. Capacity rose from 78,000 to 81,000, partly through the removal of the athletics track, and fell to 73,189 once the temporary structures were dismantled after the tournament. FIFA judged Luzhniki the best arena in the world for the visibility of the pitch from the stands.

On 18 March 2022 the Russian president Vladimir Putin held a rally at the stadium marking the eighth anniversary of the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and drawing support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine; police put attendance at about 200,000, while media reports suggested that state employees were bussed to the rally and that others were paid or forced to attend. FC Torpedo Moscow used the ground as one of their temporary home grounds from 2022 to 2024 while their own was under maintenance. Basta sold 70,000 tickets for a concert there on 18 June 2022; Polina Gagarina drew 60,000 on 29 June 2024 as the first woman to fill Luzhniki, and Yegor Krid some 80,000 on 30 August 2025, the youngest artist to do so until the twenty-year-old Vanya Dmitrienko drew about 70,000 on 2 August 2026. The Moscow city government is among the owners of the stadium, which is operated by the Russian Football Union, designated a historically valuable town-forming object and used for matches of the Russia national football team.