Stars of Stalin's skyscrapers that you have never seen

Everyone knows the seven Stalinist skyscrapers (or, as foreigners call them, Seven Sisters), which became the first Soviet skyscrapers and for a long time remained the tallest buildings in Europe.

Buildings began to be built in 1947 in honor of the celebration of the 800th anniversary of Moscow. Initially, there were to be eight skyscrapers, they even managed to lay a stylobate under the latter in Zaryadye, but later the Rossiya Hotel was built on it. Today there are seven skyscrapers: Moscow State University on Sparrow Hills, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an administrative building on Red Gates, two residential buildings (on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment and on Kudrinskaya Square) and two hotels - "Ukraine" (Radisson Royal) and "Leningrad" (Hilton Leningradskaya).

Stars are present only on six of the seven Stalinist skyscrapers, since the spire on the building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs turned out to be too fragile and could not withstand installation. All stars are of different sizes and shapes and are made of different materials.

1. Residential building on Kudrinskaya Square. Height - 156 meters

Perhaps there are only a few people (a couple of industrial climbers, FSB signalmen, several helicopter pilots and a welder E. Martynov) who happened to see the spiers and five-meter stars of Stalinist skyscrapers up close.

2. Main building of Moscow State University. Height - 240 meters

The guys from Birdseyeview - Sergey Shumilov and Daniil Ananiev - decided that it was so unfair, and photographed the stars using a professional octocopter (a kind of drone) DJI Spreading Wings S1000 with an attached Sony Nex-5R camera.

3. Hotel Radisson Royal (former hotel "Ukraine"). Height - 206 meters

Daniil Ananiev, pilot: “The drone is a radio-controlled model that runs on batteries and is guided by GPS. It can fly for 20-30 minutes, rising to a height of 500 meters (altitude depends on the location and weather), and is capable of carrying up to five kilograms of weight.

4. Residential building on Kotelnicheskaya embankment. Height - 176 meters

The flight of the drone from the ground is controlled by two people - the pilot, who controls the drone itself, and the operator, who monitors the picture and takes photos. With the help of such devices, you can shoot almost everything - cottage villages, car rallies, crowds of people at festivals. In some countries, with the help of drones and thermal imagers, they are looking for people missing in the forest. There is even a separate genre of selfies that are taken from a drone - “droni”.

5. The building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Smolenskaya-Sennaya Square. Height - 172 meters

My passion for aerial photography began with a toy helicopter that crashed on the first day. But I really wanted to see the city from a bird's eye view. I found a ham radio forum where I discovered copters, studied them for a long time and eventually bought a small hexacopter for a GoPro camera. I knew right away that it was mine. Soon the GoPro capabilities were not enough, and I ordered a quadcopter for the Sony Nex-5 camera. It was already a large enough copter that needed a second person to control the camera.

6. Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya. Height - 136 meters

My photographer friend Sergey supported this idea, and since then we have been meaningfully engaged in shooting various objects from a bird's eye view. We have created the website Birdseyeview.ru, but we can't call it a business yet, it's more of a hobby. Once, while shooting the Moscow State University building from a height, we flew close to its star, and it turned out to be a very interesting design (huge, hollow inside, a little broken). This is how our project was born.”

7. Administrative and residential building on Red Gate Square. Height - 138 meters