The Soviet Union came away from the 1952 Olympic Games, held in Helsinki, Finland, having won 71 medals. This was an impressive haul, especially given that it marked the state's first appearance at an Olympics, and it left them in second place in the overall medal table. Above them, however, sat the United States, who won only six more medals at the Olympics, but whose 40 Golds dwarfed the 22 won by the Soviets. The Soviet Union wanted more from their athletes, and considered that the best way to achieve this would be to build a state-of-the-art sports stadium, complete with training facilities, in Moscow, their capital.
 
Plans began to be made. A site in Luzhniki, across the Moskva River from the Lenin Hills (renamed the Sparrow Hills in 1999), near the centre of Moscow and well connected to the rest of the city via the Moscow Metro, was chosen for the new stadium’s location. On the 23rd December1954 these initial positional plans for what was to be called the ‘Central Lenin Stadium’ were made public. The stadium was designed in 90 days by the group of architects who had decided upon its location and construction began in the spring of 1955. Employing volunteers from all over the Soviet Union; utilising materials from Leningrad, to Irkutsk in Sibera, to Podolsk in the Moscow Oblast itself; from the Ukraine and Armenia, from Riga in Latvia, Kaunas in Lithuania, and Minsk in Belarus – the stadium was built in just 450 days. The grand opening took place on 31st July, 1956.