Ivan Shuvalov and Mikhail Lomonosov promoted the idea of a university in Moscow, and Russian Empress Elizabeth decreed its establishment on 23 January [O.S.

Catherine the Great transferred the university to a building on the other side of Mokhovaya Street, constructed between 1782 and 1793, to a design by Matvei Kazakov, and rebuilt by Domenico Giliardi after fire consumed much of Moscow in 1812.

The university press, run by Nikolay Novikov in the 1780s, published the newspaper in Imperial Russia: Moskovskie Vedomosti.

Between 1884 and 1897, the Department of Medicine built a medical campus in Devichye Pole, between the Garden Ring and Novodevichy Convent; designed by Konstantin Bykovsky [ru], with university doctors like Nikolay Sklifosovskiy and Fyodor Erismann acting as consultants.

In 1905, a social-democratic organization emerged at the university and called for the overthrow of the Czarist government and the establishment of a republic in Russia.

In 1919, the university abolished tuition fees, and established a preparatory facility to help working-class children prepare for entrance examinations.

During the implementation of Joseph Stalin's first five-year plan (1928–32), prisoners from the Gulag were forced to construct parts of the newly expanded university.

The following year, the university gained a unique status: it is funded directly from the state budget (bypassing the Ministry of Education).

[citation needed] On 6 September 1997, French electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre used the front of the university as the backdrop for a concert.

[12][13] In November 2012, Mikhail Basharatyan, Deputy Dean of the MSU World Economy Department, was fired for taking a bribe from a pupil.

[14][15] In February 2013, Andrei Andriyanov resigned as head of the Kolmogorov Special Educational and Scientific Center of the university, after an investigation concluded that he had included fake references in his doctoral thesis.

[30] Along with the university administration, the Museum of Earth Sciences and faculties of Mechanics and Mathematics, Geology, Geography, and Fine and Performing Arts are in the main building.

It is the alma mater of writers Anton Chekhov, Boris Pasternak, and Ivan Turgenev; politicians Mikhail Gorbachev, Mikhail Suslov, and Ruslan Khasbulatov; and mathematicians and physicists Vladimir Arnold, Boris Demidovich, Vladimir Drinfeld, Vitaly Ginzburg, Andrey Kolmogorov, Grigory Margulis, Andrei Sakharov, and Yakov Sinai.