House of Government of the Russian Federation

On Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment stands the House of Government of the Russian Federation — an administrative building known to almost everyone in the country by its unofficial name, the “White House.” The Russian government has worked here since 1994, but the building owes its fame chiefly to the dramatic events of the early 1990s that unfolded at its walls.

Construction of the complex for the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR began in 1972, to a design by the architect Dmitry Chechulin, who based it on his own earlier, unrealised project for an Aeroflot building. Taganskaya Square had originally been considered as the site, but in the end a plot on the embankment was chosen for the sake of an impressive view of the river, despite the cramped surrounding development. The House of Soviets became the first high-rise building in Moscow to be built on a single prefabricated reinforced-concrete frame; the complex’s total floor area exceeded 730,000 square metres. Construction was completed in 1981, and the project’s leaders were awarded the Lenin Prize.

The composition of the building is symmetrical and pyramid-like: a broad seven-storey base with a grand staircase carries a twenty-storey tower with rounded corners, faced in granite and white marble. The building is crowned by a small turret with a flagstaff, bringing its total height to 119 metres.

It was precisely at these walls that the standoff with the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP) unfolded in August 1991: President Boris Yeltsin delivered his famous speech here from atop a tank, and tens of thousands of supporters surrounded the building in a human chain. It was then that the nickname “White House” became firmly attached to it. Two years later, during the constitutional crisis of autumn 1993, the building became the centre of resistance to the decree dissolving parliament: from 23 September to 4 October it hosted the sittings of the last Congress of People’s Deputies in Russian history. The confrontation ended in an assault — artillery shells were fired at the upper floors from tanks stationed on the bridge, a fire broke out that destroyed about a third of the building’s floor area, and after the storming the premises were looted.

After these events the complex was handed over to the government and completely reconstructed, with a proposal to mark the scorched floors with black granite rejected. The clock on the tower was replaced with a gilded image of the double-headed eagle, and the building itself was fenced off from the embankment by a massive railing. In 1996 a chapel was opened nearby, in Presnensky Park, in memory of those who died during the autumn events.

Today the House of Government remains not only a working space for the federal executive branch but also one of the most recognisable symbols of recent Russian history — a monument to two turning points in post-Soviet politics that took place at the very same façade just two years apart.