Historically, when Kyiv still had military fortification walls surrounding the city which ran along the modern Khreschatyk street and in the area of the Pechersk Gate, now located in today's Maidan Nezalezhnosti square.

Eventually, the military fortification was pulled down, and as the 18th century drew to a close, development of the picturesque area quickly began turning the Ivanovo road into Ivanovskaya Street (renamed in the 1820s to Bigechevskaya when an estate of General Bigechev was constructed on it).

At the same time, the other side of the offspur also received its share of development, and the Linden tree forest was transformed into a park with a lake (in the modern location of the Ivan Franko square); all of this was inside the grounds of a massive estate that was bought in 1862 by Kyiv University professor of medicine Friedrich Mering.

However the offspur itself did not receive a lot of development due to the lack of space, and as a result, some of the Linden trees still existed for a long time afterwards.

"[1]The flat that Shevchenko describes was in a one-floor wooden house with a Mezzanine which was built by architect Alexander V. Beretti on Instutska 14, in the early 1840s.

Nearby [up the hill] is a house that appeared like a cottage (№ 16), built by the famous Kievan architect Aleksandr Vikentievich Beretti (1816-1895).

He ordered architect A. Gekker to create a project for a new house, but being not satisfied, he self-planned an original in pseudo-Mauritanian style mansion (destroyed in 1941).

The 1937 opinion of Alexander Dovzhenko about the Ginzburg house that all likewise constructions of Kyiv should be based on its geographical relief, was echoed in almost every project.

The competition dragged on for several years and eventually the organisers gave the development of the general reconstruction project of central Kyiv to the first workshop of the institute "Kievprojekt".

In the early 1950s the remaining rubble of the Ginzburg house was removed, along with the old foundation, on the edge of the plateau, and the empty space was slowly prepared for the future high rise hotel.

The finalised project featured an I shaped building with the central part towering over the two wings and topped with a decorative spire and a red star.

One of the biggest problems was construction of housing, which despite being ten years since the end of the war, was much too slow with millions of people still living in communal flats.

In 1954 construction began on the empty space on top of the flattened remnants of the offspur following the clean-up of the Ginzburg house rubble in the late 1940s.

Dobrovolsky later wrote: This object was born out of sorrows and hardships, with more than twenty individual projects that were developed, each one in turn passing the government in face of never-ending criticism.

Back then it could not have been different, because projecting one of the most responsible buildings had direct state interest.Nonetheless, even in such conditions we tried to maximise our artistic individuality, made many attempts to use traditional motifs of the past.

Later I was told that Nikita Khrushchev, during one of his visits to Kiev asked what happened to the finale of "Moskva" and after seeing that this is how the "struggle with decorative extras" is being conducted, with pity said that unique constructions are not affected by that decree and only housing property, and what happened here was just like in the old saying "make a fool pray and instead he breaks his forehead".Another author of the project B.Priymak too said that "the hotel had to have a powerful strength show the picturesque natural landscape of Kiev, towering high above the Kreschatik.

However even, when in the 1980s the Kalinin (then renamed October Revolution) square finally did obtain the full symmetric look that was originally projected, the reconstruction of Moskva deemed too complex to carry out then.