<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Universal_Store">Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin</a>, better known as the GUM department store, is a huge shopping mall on the east side of the Red Square in Moscow.
Built in 1890-93, it has an impressive 242 meters long façade - facing Kremlin on the other side of the Red Square. By the time of the Russian Revolution, the building contained some 1,200 stores. After the Revolution, the GUM was nationalised and continued to work as a department store until Joseph Stalin turned it into office space in 1928 for the committee in charge of his first Five Year Plan. After the suicide of Stalin's wife Nadezhda in 1932, the GUM was used to display her body.
After reopening as a department store in 1953, the GUM became one of the few stores in the Soviet Union that was not plagued by shortages of consumer goods, and the queues to purchase anything were long, often extending all across Red Square.
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