Ostankino Tower

Moscow's television signal came first from the tower Vladimir Shukhov devised in 1922 on Shabolovka Street, a "wicker" structure widely regarded in its day as a feat of engineering ingenuity. The Moscow television centre was built beside it in 1936–1938, the first trial transmission went out on 9 March 1938 and the centre began regular work in 1939; the aerial on the Shukhov tower gave reliable reception across almost all of Moscow and the Moscow region, but on the scale of the country its power was not enough, and by the 1950s the tower, designed for radio and adapted to television, had reached the end of its lifespan. In 1953 Sergei Novakovsky, F. Bolshakov and N. Skachkov put to Alexei Puzin, chairman of the All-Union Radio Committee, a proposal for a "factory of television programmes": a multi-programme centre with fifteen to twenty studios, a transmitting station and an aerial tower 500 metres high that would carry the signal beyond the Moscow region. Puzin approved it and presented it to Nikita Khrushchev, and on 15 July 1955 the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a resolution on the construction of a new television transmitting centre. A plot in the Cheryomushki district was allotted in January 1956, but survey work found the soils unfit for so massive a structure; sites near the Bersenevskaya embankment, Kropotkinskaya Street and the Kaluga Gate were considered before a suitable one was found on the grounds of the Ostankino nursery of the Moscow city improvement administration.

The All-Union competition for the best tower design was won by a Kyiv design institute specialising in steel structures, which proposed an openwork metal tower on the model of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The architects who would have to realise it were unenthusiastic, and Nikolai Nikitin, a member of the competition committee and a specialist in reinforced concrete and metal structures, came forward with an alternative: a tower of concrete, on the model of the concrete television tower completed two years earlier, in 1956, in Stuttgart. His opinion was listened to and he was given the chance to prepare his own application. To hold a concrete frame of separate round blocks against deformation he ran 149 tensioned steel cables through it. Nikitin said he had worked the design out in a single night and that the prototype for the cone-shaped base was an upside-down lily, a flower with strong petals and a thick stem, which had come to him in a dream days before the sketches were due. His design rested on the work of Yuri Kondratyuk, whose unbuilt wind power station on Mount Ai-Petri in the Crimea was conceived as a thin, hollow concrete structure held stable by tensioned steel cables, and for whom Nikitin had worked as an assistant in the 1930s. He was not the first to reach for the shape: in 1932 the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi had presented for a competition a slender tower rising from a cone-shaped base, from which Nikitin's differed in a longer shaft and a wider base. The rejected lattice metal design was later built as the Kyiv TV Tower, shortened by almost 30 per cent so that it would not be as tall as Ostankino.

In the spring of 1961 building was suspended over doubts about the shallow foundation Nikitin proposed, between 3.5 and 4.6 metres deep, less than that of a standard factory chimney. Colleagues pressed for reinforcement with 40-metre piles and wrote collective letters to halt the work. Nikitin was confident of his calculations but agreed to widen the base by 1.5 metres and deepen it by 2.25 metres, and on the recommendation of Fritz Leonhardt, the German engineer behind the Stuttgart tower, the number of supports was raised from four to ten. A last change lifted the design height from 505 metres to 540 with the flagpole. The final design was approved on 22 March 1963 and the work resumed.

The final design was drawn up at the central research and design institute for entertainment and sports buildings, with parts by Mosproekt-1 and nineteen other organisations. Nikitin was appointed chief constructor and worked with the engineers Boris Zlobin, Vladimir Travush, Viktor Khandzhi and Moisei Shkud, who also acted as an architect; Leonid Batalov, head of workshop No. 7 of Mosproekt, was chief architect, and Dmitri Burdin took part in the artistic side of the project. Israel Gitman, with Lev Shchipakin, led the design of the self-lifting rig for raising the reinforced-concrete shaft at speed, work that took a Great Gold Medal at the VDNKh exhibition in 1968. Building began in the summer of 1960, before the design had been finally approved: in July the SU-60 unit of the Stroitel trust moved onto the site, and on 27 September the first reinforced-concrete blocks were laid in the base of the tower. A whole town went up for the project, with a boiler house, a concrete plant and a mechanical workshop; the shaft was raised by self-lifting crane, and helicopters were used to place the antenna on top.

The architects gave the tower its finished look, setting arches between the supports, building a glazed cylinder beneath the shaft for technical services and live broadcasting studios, and cutting illuminator windows in the upper part of the cone, which left the structure with a marked resemblance to a rocket. At a height of 325 to 360 metres it was widened by a structure the size of a ten-storey house, holding equipment, a three-storey revolving restaurant and an observation deck taken from the design of the Stuttgart tower. The balconies and the shaft carried equipment for radio relay lines, mobile television stations and radiotelephone communications, facilities for special services and a meteorological complex.

By the ceremonial opening in November 1967, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the work was not finished, and a compromise was reached: on 4 November the first television signal went out from the tower, and on 5 November the state commission signed the act accepting into service the first stage of the studio complex of which the tower formed part. The second stage was handed over on 26 December 1968, and turning all the city's aerials towards the new tower took about two months more. The observation deck and the restaurant opened in 1969, the year a system of high-altitude meteorological observation began work on the tower, with a Central High-Altitude Hydrometeorological Observatory set up to process the data. A resolution of the Council of Ministers gave the tower the honorary title "named for the 50th anniversary of October", which it carried in its formal name, the All-Union Radio and Television Transmitting Station. It was the first free-standing structure to exceed 500 metres and, on completion, the tallest structure in the world, passing New York's Empire State Building as the tallest free-standing structure; the 553-metre CN Tower in Toronto took that record, in a year given variously as 1974, 1975 and 1976. In 1970 Nikitin, Zlobin, Shkud, Burdin and Shchipakin were awarded the Lenin Prize for science and technology.

The Seventh Heaven restaurant, the first revolving restaurant in the USSR, occupied three halls between 328 and 334 metres named Bronze, Silver and Golden, entered from the observation deck, each with 24 four-seat tables set along the panoramic windows. The levels turned slowly about the axis of the tower. The Soviet leaders Podgorny, Kosygin and Brezhnev came to it on 7 November 1967. Tables had to be booked in advance, each level taking no more than 80 people. It was reckoned the highest place to dine in the Soviet Union and one of the most expensive; in 1987 the cheapest hall, the Bronze, charged 7 roubles for a day visit and offered no choice of dishes. Over the thirty years before the fire the observation deck and the restaurant received more than 10 million guests, and in 1997 a glass floor was laid in the deck.

From 27 April 1967 the flag of the USSR was raised at the top of the tower and changed twice a year, for May Day and for 7 November; the banner had been planned at 50 by 20 metres and was cut to 5 by 2 out of concern for the wind load. For many years the tower held the title of the tallest flagpole in the world. The flag was taken down in 1991 and the tower stood without one for more than seventeen years; the last Soviet flag, lowered in December 1991, is kept in the tower's museum. The structure entered Soviet culture early: the New Year "Blue Light" of 1967/68 was devoted to the new tower and filmed inside it, Vladimir Orlov's novel "Danilov the Violist" of 1980 put a regular sabbath of witches and demons on it, and in 1990 the singer Valery Leontiev released the song "Ostankino Tower".

On 27 August 2000 high-frequency cables at a height of about 460 metres caught fire from overvoltage. The polyvinyl chloride sheathing of the feeders burned and carried the flames rapidly up the inside of the shaft. The first fire crews arrived eleven minutes after the outbreak and tried to stop the vertical spread with asbestos sheets, but drops of burning polyvinyl chloride passed through the gaps left by the complicated shape of the internal structures. The layout of the tower forced rescuers with equipment to climb from 381 to 420 metres by a narrow vertical metal ladder unfit for evacuation, and the first hours went on protecting the lift structures being used to bring people down. The fire suppression systems failed, so firefighters and emergency workers carried heavy equipment, chemical extinguishers among it, up the tower by hand, and temporary asbestos firewalls were put in at a height of 70 metres. During 27 August the fire reached down to a height of 80 metres, and the fight against it lasted more than a day, until the evening of 28 August. All visitors and staff were evacuated within 90 minutes of the outbreak.

Three floors of the tower burned out completely and the power supply and communications systems were damaged. The high-speed lifts fell with the structures around them, and three people died in one of the cabins: Vladimir Arsyukov, head of the state fire service directorate for the North-Eastern Administrative District of Moscow, who had set off to take a barrier of special non-combustible fabric up the tower, and the lift operator Svetlana Loseva and repair fitter Alexander Shipilin, who were accompanying him. The heat had damaged almost all the lift cables, and the cabin's safety catches could not work because the metal structures of the shaft were deformed. All three were awarded the Order of Courage posthumously. Seven firefighters were injured. Accounts of the damage to the tensioned steel cables differ, one putting the number ruined at 121 and another leaving only 19 of the 150 intact. The fire made the upper spire of the tower tilt slightly, raising concern that it might collapse; inspection found the damage heavy but no immediate risk of collapse.

The loss of equipment cut the main television channels to Moscow and the Moscow region. In the first days after the fire the ORT and RTR broadcasts were combined, while NTV's programmes went out partly on TNT and partly on Channel Five, the Kultura channel. The metre-band channels were fully restored by 4 September and part of the decimetre channels by 5 September, and for another eighteen months some of the broadcasting was run through the television centre at Shabolovka and the Shukhov tower. The blaze was the third disaster in Russia in a month, following an explosion at Moscow's Pushkinskaya metro station, which killed 13 people and injured 150, and the sinking of the submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea, in which 118 died. The Russian president Vladimir Putin said of it: "This latest accident shows the shape of our vital installations and the overall state of our country. We should not fail to see major problems in the country behind this accident, and we should not forget the economy. Whether or not such accidents happen again in the future will depend on how we work in this vital direction."

The fire resistance of the concrete shaft allowed the tower to stay in service alongside the reconstruction, which ran from 2000 to 2007. Four new lifts were manufactured by ThyssenKrupp in 2003, though their installation was completed only on 21 November 2005, and high-speed lift No. 4 was put into operation in December 2006; a service lift from the Shcherbinka works was installed in the lower cone.

In 2006 representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations gave assurances that a serious fire at Ostankino could no longer happen, no combustible materials being left in the structure; after the repairs the tower had been divided into compartments that could be shut off from both sides, and installations fitted to feed nitrogen into its rooms during a fire. In May 2007 smoke was noticed at a height of 342 metres. The lifts were out of service in the emergency, so the firefighters reached it on foot. The fire was classified at the second, heightened level of complexity, and the Emergencies Ministry attributed it to a breach of fire safety regulations during welding work. Everyone inside was evacuated and the fire was put out with no casualties.

The observation deck was fully repaired by January 2008 and opened for pilot excursions on 27 March 2008; hour-long tours have run daily since December 2010, and the open deck at 340 metres came back into use in 2011, working only in the warm season from May to October. Rebuilding Seventh Heaven took sixteen years: at first the project had no investor, and then the requirements the Ministry of Emergency Situations introduced after the fire, limiting the tower to 50 visitors at a time, stood in the way. The coffee shop and cafe levels reopened in 2016 and the restaurant hall in 2017, and it closed again in 2020 under coronavirus restrictions.

The tower drew sport of its own. The first international BASE jumping festival, Moscow BASE Open Air, was held in June 2003, the first competition of its kind in Russia, and set a world record with 26 people jumping at once; at the second, in July 2004, thirty jumped together. During that meeting the 22-year-old Austrian Kristina Grubelnik struck the tower seconds after leaving it, her parachute lines catching on the railing of a technical balcony, and she lost consciousness almost at once; the competition was stopped, Emergencies Ministry staff roped her and raised her to the balcony about half an hour later, and doctors found a craniocerebral injury. She survived. The third and last festival was held in October 2007 for the tower's fortieth anniversary, when Sergei Shvolya was seriously hurt on landing, breaking bones in his pelvis and going to hospital in a grave condition before recovering; no such festival has been held there since. Stair races were run up the narrow staircase to the deck at 337 metres, 1,704 steps above the ground: on 21 July 2018 athletes from twelve countries took part, the fastest of the 28 being the German Christian Riedl at 9 minutes 51 seconds and the women's winner the American Cynthia Harris at 12 minutes 15 seconds. The last race was run on 24 August 2019, the men's record standing to Piotr Łobodziński of Poland at 9 minutes 36 seconds and the women's to Valentina Belotti of Italy at 10 minutes 54 seconds.

The flag of Russia was hoisted on the tower on 12 June 2009, Russia Day, sewn in Vladimir from a reinforced fabric. Media façades of light-emitting diodes were mounted on two tiers of the tower in 2014 for the Circle of Light festival that October and kept afterwards for evening illumination and advertising. The concert hall in the excursion building, which also houses the directorate of the Moscow Regional Centre, seats 752 and is used for concerts, theatre, conferences and seminars. The tower belongs to that centre, a branch of the unitary enterprise Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Network, and is listed as a candidate heritage site in Russia; at 540.1 metres it was, as of 2026, the tallest free-standing structure in Europe. Its transmitters covered a population of about 10 million when construction ended and more than 15 million by 2014, across Moscow and the Moscow region and parts of the Vladimir and Kaluga regions.