The Big House

On Liteiny Prospekt, between Shpalernaya and Zakharyevskaya streets, stands a large administrative building known in the city by its unofficial name, "the Big House". It was built in the early 1930s for the state security agencies, and today it houses the regional directorate of the FSB responsible for the city and Leningrad Region. Since 2001 the building has been included in the register of cultural heritage sites of federal significance.

The building was erected on the site of the District Court, which had burned down in 1917 — formerly the Old Arsenal, the work of the architect Vasily Bazhenov. Construction was carried out in 1931–1932 on the initiative of Sergei Kirov, and the design was developed by a group of architects led by Alexander Gegello, Andrei Ol and Noi Trotsky. The building opened on 7 November 1932, and its prison wing was put into operation in November 1934 — almost immediately after that, the institution began receiving prisoners in the case of Kirov's assassination.

The building is executed in the monumental, heavy forms of late Constructivism and presents its façades to three city streets at once. The central façade is built on an alternation of tall pilasters and window openings, their vertical rhythm set off by a massive plinth storey faced in dark-red granite. Glazed corner towers contrast with the flat wall surfaces, forming a unified symmetrical composition. Inside, a vestibule with black and light-grey columns of artificial marble is repeated in reduced form on each of the eight floors, and oak-panelled corridors lead to the offices. The assembly hall on the seventh floor spans the height of two storeys and is faced with pink marble; on its wall survives a bas-relief profile of Vladimir Lenin by the sculptor Grigory Kepinov, executed in 1932.

The complex of state security buildings also included the Pass Office (Dom Propuskov) at 6 Liteiny Prospekt, built on the site of the Sergievsky Cathedral, and the old tsarist prison known to city residents as the "Shpalerka" — located nearby, at the neighbouring address on Shpalernaya Street. In the following decades the building retained its function as the regional directorate of the state security agencies, successively named the OGPU, NKVD, MGB and KGB.

Today the Big House remains an active departmental building and a monument of early Soviet architecture. Its silhouette with corner towers has long been an architectural dominant of Liteiny Prospekt, and the story of the agency housed here was used in the television series "Liteiny, 4".

The building reflects the search for new architectural forms of the early 1930s, when Constructivist devices were gradually combined with more monumental classical motifs. It remains a significant historical and architectural site in the centre of the city, defining the appearance of the buildings along Liteiny Prospekt.