House of Unions & State Duma

The buildings lining Okhotny ryad, just north of Tverskaya ul, serve official functions. The glowering State Duma was erected in the 1930s for Gosplan (Soviet State Planning Department), source of the USSR’s Five-Year Plans, but it is now the seat of the Russian parliament. The green-columned House of Unions dates from the 1780s. Its ballroom, called the Hall of Columns, is the famous location of one of Stalin’s most grotesque show trials, that of Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Communist Party theorist who had been a close associate of Lenin. Both buildings are closed to the public.