The Lubyanka: Moscow’s dark heart

[Larry1]

Perhaps the few of you interested in Russian history will enjoy this article about Lubyanka.  I knew nothing about the place except for its being the headquarters of the CHEKA, predecessor to the NKVD and KGB.

The Lubyanka: Moscow’s dark heart

February 10, 2014 Georgy Manaev, Dmitriy Romendik, special to RBTH

To Russians the word “Lubyanka” has as menacing a sound to it as the word “Gulag”. Home first to the Soviet and then the Russian security agencies, in the 20th century this Moscow square became synonymous with executions, violence and torture. But more than a century before that it was home to one of history’s most infamous female serial killers.

In the 18th century, noblewoman Darya Saltykova, one of the most notorious serial killers in global history, settled down in Lubyanka. The Privy Chancellery, the secret department of the Imperial secret police, was quartered nearby. Its functions routinely involved tortures, but these were administered on government orders. In the house of Saltykova, serfs would be maimed and killed for pleasure.

Saltykova, who hailed from an aristocratic family, was a devout Christian. Nevertheless, she engaged in outright sadism. Saltykova came across as being quite sane until her husband died. She then took to beating her servants with a log, and later began having people flogged, sometimes even to death. Saltykova gradually acquired a taste for this gruesome punishment and began perfecting the tortures. She could rip off a person's hair or set it on fire, or scald people with boiling water.

Saltykova is suspected of having caused 75 violent deaths, mostly women and young girls, but the actual figure may have been higher.

Her bonds began complaining to the police and to the Moscow governor, but Saltykova was well connected at court: Her influential friends and relatives would get her out of trouble time after time. Bribes also helped. Years passed before a petition finally make it into the hands of Empress Catherine the Great.

Catherine was not amused, and ordered an exemplary trial. Only 38 deaths were verified but that was more than enough for a guilty verdict. Saltykova was stripped of her aristocracy and confined for life to a lightless cellar in a convent. She was also proclaimed a man, because the Empress judged her unworthy of being called a woman. After 11 years in the cellar, Saltykova was moved to an outbuilding. Curious Muscovites would crowd outside her window as Saltykova swore and spat on them. She lived in confinement for another 33 years before her death.

Museum of fear

After the revolution of 1917, the Soviet variant of the Tsarist secret police – the Emergency Commission or Cheka – moved into a building on Lubyanka Square. The square was a bustling place back then, a focal point of several busy streets. In the center was a fountain, at which cab drivers would leave their horses to drink while they took some rest in the numerous local taverns. Whenever a Muscovite wanted to catch a ride to go to a local address or to a neighbouring district, they would go to Lubyanka for a cab.

Before it was nationalized, the Cheka building had housed the insurance society Rossiya, which specialized in renting out apartment and trading spaces. A prison was set up in the building in 1920, which later was to “process” the infamous terrorist Boris Savenkov, the great poet Osip Mandelshtam, Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and countless others, most of whom were brought here in the dead of night. Many executions would also be carried out in the building over the years.

The system of intimidation was honed to a morbid perfection: The convict was either lifted up in a slow freight lift to the thundering roar of motors or walked on foot through endless gloomy corridors. After three days of constant interrogations, anyone would lose their spatial orientation in the windowless rooms.

Some of the cells in the former prison are now part of a museum. There was a brief period when anyone could gain access to the exposition, but these days it is only open to holders of special permits.

Iron Felix

Not far from the Lubyanka building used to be the KGB's reception office. This was where relatives of those detained would come to bring food and letters to their loved ones. It was also there that informants would queue up to offload their anonymous letters.

In 1958, the fountain was replaced by a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, also known as Iron Felix. For decades that monument remained the main symbol of the country’s system of repression, all the way up until the collapse of Soviet rule in 1991. Gavriil Popov, the first post-Soviet mayor of Moscow, ordered the dismantling of the 11-ton statue. On the evening of August 2, 1991 an elated crowd cheered on as a crane lifted Iron Felix down from his pedestal.

The monument can now be found in the Museon Art Park in Moscow. Curiously, debates on its possible restoration to its site on Lubyanka Square periodically flare up in the Russian media even now.

http://rbth.ru/society/2014/02/10/the_lubyanka_moscows_dark_heart_34053.html

[jone]

I know I've said this before, but Lubyanka was always referred to as the highest place in Moscow.  The joke was that from Lubyanka, you could see all the way to Siberia.

[lordtiberius]

Have you ever been there?

[mendeleyev]

Interesting place, and the scene of several annual opposition events. Also the scene of a picnic date when Mrs. M and I were courting. I made sandwiches and we sat on benches in the little park area and discussed her view of KGB history and other romantic themes.

It is also the place where John Kerry claimed to have toured. He made the claim during one of the presidential debates when he was a candidate. There is no record of him touring Lubyanka, but he may have visited the square (outside). What was sad was that he called it Treblinka, the name of a Nazi death camp for Jews in Poland. The US journalists hosting the debates were not very bright, and the whole thing went over their heads.

[lordtiberius]

Thank you sir.

I heard the building it replaced was much smaller and more aesthetically pleasing.  Have you ever been inside?

[mendeleyev]

I have, early 2000s if memory serves. After the fall of the CCCP the government wanted to put on a more friendly face and there were tours, of varying lengths. I'm not sure if they do that anymore since the new KGB museum has opened.

There are tours advertised to tourists, but most of those don't go inside. Instead they hit a number of spots along the Square. Besides Lubyanka itself, not far away is the Gulag History Museum which is worth visiting.

[lordtiberius]

Is it still called Dzerzhinsky square?

What were your impressions about the inside?

[mendeleyev]

Нет. Лубянская площадь.

[mendeleyev]

What were your impressions about the inside?

3 words: Cold, concrete, steel.

Conditions: no heat, no sunlight, no ventilation. The isolation cells were so horribly small that it was impossible for a prisoner to lie down, yet the average time in isolation was 48 hours.

Most moving: seeing names of prisoners etched into concrete using metal spoons. Seeing crude calenders where prisoners kept track of time by notching marks for each day on walls and ceilings.

Takeaways: wondering how many innocent people were herded into overcrowded cells, and how many of them never left alive? What must it have been like for a terrified prisoner? Then, for those who worked there: how could one see so much misery and death, and still remain loyal to the system?

Emotions: extreme sadness at the inhumanity that was tolerated for so long.







The official KGB museum does portray some of those things, but in an antiseptic way. That is why I like the nearby Gulag History Museum in that it doesn't hold back.

[mendeleyev]

What one must remember is that the Soviets did not invent this madness of terror by themselves. They inherited a system that was already in place. The difference was the intensity and the paranoia of the Soviet culture, and that made especially terrifying by the inhuman and satanic madman, Stalin, and his terror associates.

[lordtiberius]

I am somewhat familiar with the Tsarist system.  Solzenitysn wrote somewhat about it because there was a prisoner who he served with who endured both.  I also read some things about the last Nicholas Tsar that portrayed him as more involved in the government than what historians let on.  Father Walter Ciszek was in Lubayanka.  I heard it is not an attractive building, is that true?

Also was the prison also the base for NKVD/KGB HQ?

[mendeleyev]

 

I heard it is not an attractive building, is that true?

You are asking the wrong person: knowing the history, a very sad one, that makes it so famous, I cannot help but feeling my stomach churn every time we see it.

If I didn't know about the history, perhaps one could appreciate it during the 1800s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubyanka_Building#mediaviewer/File:RossijaLubjanka.jpg


There are three building that make up the complex, but the one most often identified has the yellow brick facade. It was constructed in the 1800s and then remodeled in the 1940s. It was renovated again in 1983.

The contrasts are mind-boggling:

- Although now closed, for a long time across the plaza (on Театральный) was the popular department store (Детский мир) Children's World!

- These days there is the popular chain (кофе хауз) Coffee House.  One could sit there sipping a hot cup of java while observing Lubyanka, while waiting to be arrested.

пр-д Театральный, 5

[mendeleyev]

[lordtiberius]

When do we ever learn? 

The Soviets still have many admirers in America . . .

[mendeleyev]

Expat journalist Jennifer Eremeeva has written a very nice piece on Lubyanka and the Children's World store nearby.

http://tinyurl.com/mjgm7yn


Her stuff is worth reading on a regular basis: http://jennifereremeeva.com/

[Anotherkiwi]

Expat journalist Jennifer Eremeeva has written a very nice piece on Lubyanka and the Children's World store nearby.

http://tinyurl.com/mjgm7yn

What a wonderful writer! 

I found this piece eerily reminiscent of the standard nonsense which is being peddled at the moment about Ukraine, and how everything to do with the Maidan is the fault of the USA.

I worry about the interpretation of history in Russia when I visit Moscow’s Museum of Contemporary Russian History. This awkwardly assembled testimony to an intensely awkward period (1880s – present) in Russia’s history recently mounted a temporary exhibit dedicated to Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna (1864-1918), who was Empress Alexandra’s elder sister. In widowhood, the Grand Duchess became a nun, founded the order of Martha and Mary and ministered to the poorest in Moscow. Like Alexandra, she was murdered by the Bolsheviks and made a Holy Martyr of the Russian Orthodox Church. When I first visited the Soviet Union in 1987, I wanted to visit the convent, which was abandoned after the revolution and allowed to fall into rack and ruin. The tour organizers claimed no knowledge of Elizaveta Fyodorovna or the location of the convent. Last week at the exhibit, which was co-sponsored by the now-re-opened Convent of Martha and Mary, I sat through a very long film produced by the church during which the narrator declared that “as everyone knows, the order to assassinate the Romanovs came from the American Federation of Jews.” I looked around at the eight or nine people who were watching the film with me to see if they, like me, were taken aback by this declaration. One old woman crossed herself reverently. Another man polished his glasses, and a bored schoolgirl tapped on her iPhone.

Presumably this went in one ear and out the other of the remaining half dozen visitors.  If this is the standard reaction of even a small cross-section of the Russian public, who should surely know better, then it's no wonder that the Kremlin has been so easily able to manipulate the minds of its citizens.

[mendeleyev]

Anotherkiwi

Presumably this went in one ear and out the other of the remaining half dozen visitors.  If this is the standard reaction of even a small cross-section of the Russian public, who should surely know better, then it's no wonder that the Kremlin has been so easily able to manipulate the minds of its citizens.

Unfortunately, we have a long heritage in Russia of producing Zombies. The current government is expertly applying the same brainwashing techniques as the Soviets.

[lordtiberius]

I blame Jews for everything potholes, AIDS, climate change, everything.

[Muzh]

I blame Jews for everything potholes, AIDS, climate change, everything.

This is prime!! 


Are you going to report yourself to the authorities so you can lose your military benefits?


What a dope.

[Boethius]

He was just being sarcastic/humourous.

[Boethius]

Anotherkiwi
Unfortunately, we have a long heritage in Russia of producing Zombies. The current government is expertly applying the same brainwashing techniques as the Soviets.

There has been a Russian narrative for a long time blaming Bolshevism on "the Jews".   On this forum and the other, I (and the better half) have been accused of being "Jews" (as if that is some form of insult!) by dyed in the wool former commies and Russian "patriots", because I happened to have contradicted their world views.  Another Muscovite made a point of posting that all the oligarchs are "foreign", i.e., she meant Jewish, not ethnic Russians. 
 
So, the current propaganda is working. 

[cc3]

He was just being sarcastic/humourous.

It's OK, Boe. Muzh and LT are RWD's in-house tag team. When one posts the other reflexively counterattacks. It's rather amusing, especially when one has them both on 'Ignore', as I do. I see one name pop up as a poster on a particular board, usually immediately followed by the name of the other team member posting in knee jerk response..

[lordtiberius]

It's OK, Boe. Muzh and LT are RWD's in-house tag team. When one posts the other reflexively counterattacks. It's rather amusing, especially when one has them both on 'Ignore', as I do. I see one name pop up as a poster on a particular board, usually immediately followed by the name of the other team member posting in knee jerk response..

Feeling neglected?

[mendeleyev]

Boe, you are correct. You also know my Dutch last name, the ending which can look Jewish to some, and for that I've been grilled numerous times (in Russia, but never in Ukraine). It is not something I shy from although I am not of that ethnicity.

This goes back deep into Russia's history with the Pogroms by the Tsars and simply continued into Soviet times. For those unfamiliar with that part of Russia's history, a beautifully done illustration can be found in the "Fiddler On the Roof." That is by no means a complete history or story, but a good illustration of the racism against Jews by ethnic Russians.

I find it fascinating that over the centuries many Jews in that region chose to live in Ukraine--yet supposedly we are asked to believe that it is the Ukrainians who are fascist. In the same vein, today's Crimean Tatars (Muslims) identify with Ukraine, are afraid of Russia for solid historical reasons, and most hope for the eventual return of Crimea to Ukraine.

[Larry1]

I find it fascinating that over the centuries many Jews in that region chose to live in Ukraine

I suppose that was because Ukraine was within the Pale of Settlement.

For readers who aren't as familiar with Tsarist Russia, Jews were pretty much limited to living in an area called The Pale of Settlement, most of which consisted of what is today Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire), and Ukraine.