The university was founded in 1804 as Imperial Kazan University, which makes it the second oldest continuously existing tertiary education institution in Russia. Founder of non-Euclidean geometry Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky served there as the rector from 1827 until 1846. In 1925, the university was renamed in honour of its student Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). The university is known as the birthplace of organic chemistry due to works by Aleksandr Butlerov, Vladimir Markovnikov, Aleksandr Arbuzov, and the birthplace of electron spin resonance discovered by Evgeny Zavoisky. In 2023 it was ranked as the #860 university in the world by US News & World Report.[2]
