Government Building sights in Moscow
- Sort by:
- Popular
-
Government Buildings
The lane to the right (south), immediately inside the Trinity Gate Tower, passes the 17th-century Poteshny Palace (Poteshny Dvorets) where Stalin later lived. Poteshny Palace was built by Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich and housed the first Russian theatre. Here Tsar Alexey enjoyed various comedy performances; however, in keeping with conservative Russian Orthodox tradition, after the show he would go to the banya (Russian bathhouse), then attend a church service to repent his sins.
The bombastic marble, glass and concrete Kremlin Palace of Congresses (Kremlyovksy Dvorets Syezdov), built in 1960-61 for Communist Party congresses, is also a concert and ballet auditorium which…
reviewed
-
A
White House
Moscow’s White House, scene of two crucial episodes in recent Russian history, stands just north of Novoarbatsky most. It was here that Boris Yeltsin rallied the opposition that confounded the 1991 hard-line coup, then two years later sent in tanks and troops to blast out conservative rivals, some of them the same people who backed him in 1991. The images of Yeltsin climbing on a tank in front of the White House in 1991, and of the same building ablaze after the 1993 assault, are among the most unforgettable from those tumultuous years. These days, things are relatively stable around the White House, where Prime Minister Putin now has his office. The White House –…
reviewed
-
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.
reviewed
-
B
Central Committee Building
Communist history can be seen on Staraya pl, where the western side of the square is taken up with the Central Committee Building, once the most important decision-making organ of the communist party and thus the whole of the Soviet Union.
reviewed
-
C
Lubyanka Prison
In the 1930s Lubyanka Prison was the feared destination of thousands of innocent victims of Stalin’s purges. Today the grey building looming on the northeastern side of the square is no longer a prison, but is the headquarters of the newly named Federal Security Service, or Federalnaya Sluzhba Beopasnosti. The FSB keeps a pretty good eye on domestic goings on. The building is not open to the public. The much humbler Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism stands in the little garden on the southeastern side of the square. This single stone slab comes from the territory of an infamous 1930s labour camp situated on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea.
reviewed