House on the Embankment

The House on the Embankment, officially called the House of Government, is a residential complex built in 1931 on Bersenevskaya Embankment, a Constructivist architectural landmark. Until 1952 it remained Moscow's tallest residential building, and at the time of its completion it was considered the largest residential complex in Europe. The building is infamously known as home to the Soviet elite, thousands of whom suffered during Stalin's repressions, and it has repeatedly featured in literary works, including Yuri Trifonov's novella of the same name.

The idea for the house arose in the late 1920s, when it became necessary to house staff of the USSR Central Executive Committee and Council of People's Commissars, who until then had lived in the Kremlin and Moscow hotels — the Kremlin was being prepared as Stalin's personal residence. The design was led by architect Boris Iofan, recently returned from Italy, and the construction commission included Alexei Rykov, Avel Yenukidze, and Genrikh Yagoda. Construction on the site of the demolished Wine and Salt Yard continued from 1928 to 1931: the walls were originally planned to be faced in pink granite to match the Kremlin, but gray was chosen instead because of the nearby boiler house of a tram substation. The number of apartments grew during construction from 440 to 505.

The complex of eight blocks, nine to eleven stories high, occupied 3.3 hectares on Bolotny Island and included 25 entrances — the most prestigious were entrances No. 1 and No. 12, whose windows faced the Kremlin. The spacious apartments, up to 300 square meters, had hot water supply that was lacking even in the Kremlin, garbage chutes, oak parquet floors, and molded ceilings designed by Hermitage restorers. The grounds featured a laundry, a clinic, a kindergarten, a library, a gym, and the 1,500-seat “Udarnik” cinema with a retractable roof that was rarely opened. At the same time, residents were bound by a strict regime: guests were admitted only by prior phone call, and celebrations had to end by eleven at night.

From 1933, and especially in 1937–1938, the house was swept by a wave of arrests: more than seven hundred residents were subjected to repression, including Marshals Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vasily Blyukher, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Alexei Rykov and his wife, and dozens of party and state officials. Some apartments changed owners five times within a few years, entire entrances stood sealed, and the wives of those repressed were often sent to labor camps and their children to orphanages. These years gave the house several grim nicknames that reflected the people's memory of the tragedy.

Today the complex is protected by the state as a cultural heritage monument; besides apartments, it houses the Estrada Theatre, the “Udarnik” cinema, and the offices of various organizations. In 1989 the “House on the Embankment” museum opened in a former caretaker's apartment — and since 2016 it has become part of a structure that brings together museum materials on the history of the Gulag — so the house preserves the memory of the fates of the residents of one of the most contradictory addresses in Soviet Moscow.