Kazan Federal University

Kazan Federal University, founded in 1804, is the third oldest university in Russia after Moscow and St Petersburg. The main building on Kremlyovskaya Street is a long yellow-and-white neoclassical block with a colonnade, designed in the 1820s. Inside, the assembly hall and the original library reading room are sometimes shown on guided tours.

The campus also includes a small but well-presented zoological museum, a herbarium, and an astronomical observatory in the courtyard. The university shop on the corner sells reasonable books and souvenirs.

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A story
Lenin enrolled at Kazan University in 1887 at the age of seventeen, was expelled within months for taking part in a student protest, and was sent into internal exile at his grandfather's estate. The mathematician Lobachevsky, founder of non-Euclidean geometry, was a graduate, professor, and rector of the same university — his statue stands in the small park across the road.

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