Lubyanka

On Lubyanka Square stands a massive building that has housed Soviet and later Russian state security agencies since 1919. It was built back in the late 19th century as an income-generating apartment building for the “Russia” insurance company — the design was the work of architects Proskurnin, Ivanov, and Velichkin. More than a century later, the building remains one of the most recognizable, and at the same time one of the most closed, addresses in the Russian capital.

The plot on this site had belonged to the Dadiani princes since the 18th century, and after the fire of 1812 the burned-out estate was bought by the industrialist Fyodor Mosolov, a collector of paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. The house later passed to his nephew and great-nephew, who set up a print gallery there and rented out the remaining rooms as furnished lodgings — their way of life was vividly described in the essays of Vladimir Gilyarovsky. In 1894 the estate was bought by the “Russia” insurance company for almost half a million roubles, and an architectural competition was held for the construction of an apartment building with hotel rooms.

After the October Revolution the mansion was taken over by the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky, and in 1920 a separate courtyard building was converted into an internal prison. Over the following decades the agency was repeatedly renamed — OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, KGB — and since 1996 the complex has been occupied by the Federal Security Service (FSB). Staff numbers grew rapidly: while about two and a half thousand people worked here in 1928, by the early 1940s the figure had exceeded thirty thousand, and the agency regularly needed additional space.

To accommodate the growing apparatus, a new Constructivist building facing Furkasovsky Lane was added behind the old one in 1932–1933, designed by Langman and Bezrukov. In 1939 the reconstruction of the entire complex was entrusted to Alexei Shchusev, who conceived of uniting the disparate buildings behind a single monumental façade; the war interrupted the construction, and the work was only completed by 1947–1948. The building acquired its final, fully symmetrical appearance only in the 1980s, thanks to architect Gleb Makarevich.

In 1958 a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich was erected in front of the façade — it stood until the events of August 1991, when it was dismantled before a large crowd and moved to Muzeon Park, where the sculpture remains today. A memorial plaque to former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov also hung on the building’s wall; it was removed at the same time as the monument but restored to its original place in 1999.

Today the building on Lubyanka remains the headquarters of Russia’s FSB and one of the symbols of the Soviet and post-Soviet history of the security services. Despite the institution’s secrecy, the monumental façade, whose history spans more than a century of architectural and political change, has long become part of the familiar face of central Moscow and a landmark on the city’s map.