Lubyanka Building
The Lubyanka (Russian: Лубя́нка, IPA: [lʊˈbʲankə]) is the headquarters of the FSB and a prison on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. It was previously the national headquarters of the KGB; Soviet hammers and sickles can be seen on the building's façade.
Lubyanka was built on the spot where Catherine the Great had once headquartered her secret police.[1] Lubyanka was originally built in 1898 as the headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company. In Soviet days it became the place suspected traitors were taken for interrogation.
The building became famous as the HQ of the KGB, both in reality and in novels and films. A prison on the ground floor of the building figures prominently in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.[2]
This was where, successively, the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB, did their work.
Lubyanka Building Media
This 1961 photo of the Lybyanka building shows its "half done form". The right side had been rebuilt to Shchusev's neo-renaissance design in the 1940s; the left side (barely visible here) still has its 19th century looks. It would be rebuilt to match the right side in the 1980s.
The Lubyanka during renovations in 1983, with the left half still lower.
The Lubyanka on a Russian commemorative coin, 2022.
The front entrance of the building of state security bodies, 2008
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References
- ↑ Richardson, Dan (2001). The Rough Guide to Moscow. Rough Guides. ISBN 978-1-85828-700-3.
- ↑ Yet other sources say it was on the toop floor.