Central Telegraph

The Central Telegraph building on Tverskaya Street is an example of Soviet Art Deco, erected in 1925–1927 to a design by engineer and architect Ivan Rerberg. It housed the city's main telegraph station as well as hubs for long-distance and international telephone communication. Today the building is protected by the state as a cultural heritage site, and in 2025 T-Bank became its new owner.

The plot at the corner of Tverskaya Street and Gazetny Lane was acquired back in the 1910s by the “Rossiya” insurance company for apartment buildings, but construction was halted by the First World War, and after the revolution the unfinished foundation was nationalized and abandoned. In 1922 the land was transferred to the People's Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs, and three years later the Moscow Architectural Society announced an all-Union competition for a design of the new building. Among twenty-one entries, the Constructivist project by the Vesnin brothers stood out, having calculated the shortest routes for staff and telegram movement. Formal victory was awarded to Alexander Grinberg, but the client simultaneously commissioned two off-competition versions from Alexei Shchusev and Ivan Rerberg; Shchusev's bold glazed design was rejected as not meeting the requirements, and the choice fell on Rerberg's solution, which became one of the first examples of Soviet Art Deco.

Construction on the pre-revolutionary foundation took two years, and installing the equipment took just as long again. The complex was officially named the Podbelsky House of Communications, while the press called it a mechanized palace of communications. The 54,000-square-meter building forms an enclosed quadrangle with a five-sided tower on the corner; due to the terrain, the structure was set 6.6 meters below street level, freeing up space for passageways into the neighboring lanes. The tower is decorated with an early version of the Soviet coat of arms featuring a globe that once rotated, and on the Nikitsky Lane side the building is topped by an old tower clock — presumably of German manufacture — that still works today and is wound by hand once a week.

It was from here that Vyacheslav Molotov announced Germany's attack to the country on June 22, 1941, and in May 1945 Yuri Levitan read out the announcement of Germany's surrender; early in the war, telegraph specialists also set up a temporary radio studio in the Kremlin for Stalin's addresses. In the second half of the twentieth century, up to 800,000 telegrams passed through the building daily, and up to two and a half million on holidays, which earned it the Order of Lenin in 1966.

Contemporaries received Rerberg's architecture with mixed feelings: critics called it old-fashioned and accused it of imitating bourgeois models. Nevertheless, the building survived decades of use, retaining its status as a key communications hub for the country. Since 1985 a museum of telegraph history has operated here, with exhibits on the development of postal and telegraph communication in Russia, and the architectural landmark itself remains one of the recognizable dominants of Tverskaya Street.