Lubyanka of Moscow | Russia Travel

Lubyanka - Delve into History

On Lubyanka Square in Moscow is where the headquarters of the KGB and prison can be found, and is also popularly called the Lubyanka. In 1897 Alexander V. Ivanov designed the large yellow brick building, which was then augmented by Aleksey Shchusev between 1940 and 1947.

Originally the Lubyanka, with its lovely parquet floors and pale green walls, was built as the Neo-Baroque headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company. Forgetting the scale of the large building, it does not come over as an impressive edifice. It has isolated Palladian and Baroque details, for instance on the minute pediments over the corner bays and the central Laggia or corridor. These, however, are lost with the continuous repeating of the palace façade, where three bands of cornices exaggerated the horizontal lines. Centered at the top of the façade is a clock.

With the Bolshevik Revolution, the government took the Lubyanka building for the Cheka or the secret police to be used as headquarters. During the Great Purge it was realized that the building was too small for all the staff working there, so in 1940 the famous Soviet architect, Shchusev, was brought on in to increase its size by demolishing back street buildings.

Schusev’s design brought out the Neo-Renaissance detailing of the left side of the façade, due to the war and other interruptions. The Lubyanka stayed and survived as it was left until 1983, when Yuri Andropov urged the completion of the building in accordance with Shchusev’s plans.

Over the years the secret police changed its name repeatedly but they continued to stay on in this building. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s classic study of the Soviet police, the prison on the ground floor is mentioned many times. Raoul Wallenberg and Father Walter Ciszek, S.J. are famous inmates who once were held there to be tortured and interrogated.

Once the KGB had been dissolved, the Lubyanka later became headquarters of the Border Guards and “housed one directorate of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB)”. Later a museum was added and opened to the public displaying information on the KGB. On November 1999, four FSB agents were injured during a fire that broke out in the Lubyanka, but there was very little damage and was later shown to have occurred due to faulty wiring.

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