The Lubyanka is the building on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow that has served as headquarters of the Soviet and Russian state security services since 1918. Built in the late 1890s as the offices of the All-Russia Insurance Company, it was taken over by the Cheka after the Bolshevik government moved to Moscow in 1918, and it remained the headquarters of the Cheka’s successors, including the OGPU, NKVD, MGB, and KGB. Since the Soviet collapse it has housed the Federal Security Service (FSB).

The building contained an internal prison where many victims of the Great Terror were interrogated, and the name ‘Lubyanka’ became shorthand for the security service itself. A statue of Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky stood in front of the building from 1958 until crowds pulled it down in August 1991 after the failed coup. The KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate, moved to a separate complex at Yasenevo in the early 1970s.

Sources

• Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. HarperCollins, 1990.
• Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.