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.

Original headquarters building of the All-Russia Insurance Company, before 1917
The Lubyanka

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.

References
  1. Richardson, Dan (2001). The Rough Guide to Moscow. Rough Guides. ISBN 978-1-85828-700-3.
  2. Yet other sources say it was on the toop floor.
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