Twelve Colleges

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The Twelve Colleges took twenty years to build, from 1722-1742. The original intention of the building was to house the twelve governmental bodies of Russia: the Senate, the Synod, and the ten ministries. It was designed by Domenico Trezzini, and finished by D. Schwertfeger and B.C Rastrelli. The twelve red and white buildings are over 400 meters long, and combined into one long building on the backside. Originally, these twelve buildings were built in front of a canal, however over time the canal became filled in completely.

The Twelve colleges were founded as one of the most prominent universities in Russia in 1819,. The university graduated many influential and famous alumni including “the writers Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Ivan Turgenev, the poet Alexander Blok, Prime minister and a reformer Pyotr Stolypin and the head of the 1917 Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky. Vladimir Lenin passed his finals at the Law Faculty in1891, receiving his Law degree” . Presently, the university has over twenty thousand students, two thousand professors, two hundred and ten departments, and a library with over four million volumes. Along with the grand size of this university, it also has the prestige of graduating eight Nobel Prize winners . This university is one of the greatest in the country.

Sources for this page

http://www.pran.ru/eng/history/20021211024821history.html ”Russian Academy of Sciences”. 2002. 31 March 2003.

http://www.cityvision2000.com/city_tour/university.html “Virtual Tour”. Moscow Hotels, JSC. 2001-2002. 31 March 2003.