Lensoviet House

On the embankment of the Karpovka River stands one of the best-known residential buildings of Leningrad Constructivism, built for the city's party and Soviet officials. The building acquired the popular name "Lensoviet House" — after the governing body for whose staff the housing was erected. Today the building is recognised as an architectural monument and, at the same time, a witness to tragic pages of the city's history.

The house was built in 1931–1934 to a design by the architects Yevgeny Levinson and Igor Fomin, son of the renowned architect Ivan Fomin. The building was erected as elite housing of improved layout for the party, economic and creative workers of Leningrad, and became one of the last major monuments of Constructivism in the city before architectural tastes shifted toward Neoclassicism.

The composition consists of a concave six-storey central block and two five-storey side wings, the curved line of the main façade echoing the contours of the river. The building stands on a stone-faced terrace that protects it from flooding, and at second-floor level an open gallery on slender round columns is arranged. Seventy-six apartments, of three to six rooms, had bathrooms and built-in furniture, some spread over two levels. The house had a laundry with mechanical washing, a hairdresser's, a grocery shop and a kindergarten, and solariums were arranged on the roofs. A fountain adorns the courtyard, and the stone fence with its gates is decorated with reliefs of ears of wheat and sporting motifs.

Over the years the People's Artist of the USSR Yuri Yuryev and the chairman of the Leningrad City Executive Committee Pyotr Lazutin lived here. On 20 June 1939 the director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested from his second-floor apartment — his wife Zinaida Reich later referred to this address in a letter to Stalin. In 1937–1938 around twenty residents of the house, who worked in Soviet economic and party structures, were executed. In the 1950s the writer Tatyana Tolstaya, granddaughter of Alexei Tolstoy, grew up in one of the apartments and later described her family's history in autobiographical prose.

The building's façades were filmed for the movies "Once Having Lied…" and "Sisters" by Sergei Bodrov Jr. In 2016, when preparing for façade repairs, an inspection revealed that the load-bearing beams were corroded and dangerous cracks had appeared in the floor slabs — the estimate for major repairs had to be revised. In 2019 contractors restored the terrazzite plaster of the façades.

Lensoviet House remains, for the city, a rare example of late Constructivism with well-considered social infrastructure, and at the same time a memorial site recalling the repressions of the 1930s among its first residents.