Russia’s First Fire Insurance Company tenement house

In Lubyanskaya Square, on the side where it intersects with Kuznetsky Most Street, right after the Church of the Presentation of Virgin Mary that would later be demolished, stood house number 21/5. Built in 1905-1907 by architects L.N.Benoit and A.N.Gunst, the building accommodated the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID) of the USSR, established in 1923. Before the 1917 revolution, it used to be a revenue house in the possession of Russia’s First Fire Insurance Company. In the early 18th century, several large land plots at the corner of Vvedenskaya Street (currently Kuznetsky Most Street) and Sretenka Street (now known as Bolshaya Lubyanka) belonged to the House of Golitsyn. Their extensive property included a two-storey stone mansion surrounded by several wooden buildings. In 1819, the property was acquired by Vasily Vargin, an exclusive supplier of textiles for the Russian army and a man of wealth. He counted among his friends the poet A.F.Merzlyakov and brothers N. and K.Polevoy. In 1830, Vargin fell out of favor with the Defense Minister A.I.Tatishchev; he was arrested and his properties were confiscated by the government. They weren’t returned to him in full until 1858, a year before his death. Subsequently, Vargin’s Moscow estate was passed to his heirs – his daughter M.I.Lyaskovskaya, the wife of N.E.Lyaskovsky who was the professor of chemistry at Moscow University, and her brother N.I.Vargin, an employee of the Agricultural Company. Since the mid-19th century, the two-storey building overlooking Kuznetsky Most housed a variety of shops: a store of the Mertvag family textile factory; Ovchinnikov’s jewelry store; a book store of Deibners, a merchant from Riga; a shop of antique and rare items of A.A. Bo; and a store of the first Russian bent beechwood furniture factory owned by Voytsehov. The artist I.N.Pavlov, who came to prominence by creating unusual woodcuts and linocuts depicting the old Moscow architecture, lived in the house in the early 1900’s. In 1903, the whole land plot was acquired by the First Russian Fire Insurance Company of N.S.Mordvinov and L.I.Stieglitz for a sum of 1,006,518 rubles and 56 kopeks; the company had been operating on the premises since 1880’s - it rented offices in the main building. Two years later, the firm built a large six-storey tenement house in the neoclassical style. In 1910s, a photo studio of K.A.Fischer and the first Russian Automobile Club of Moscow rented offices in the new house. The People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) occupied the building from 1918 to 1952. The famous writer Boris Pasternak used to visit the ministerial library with a reading room located in this building as he worked on his Leniniana in the autumn and winter of 1924 and 1925. His family, which had recently been blessed with a son, was in dire financial straits. Pasternak knew he needed to find a job that would provide a stable income, and it was all he could think about: ‘Without a stable income, I would be too anxious to live in an atmosphere that was entirely, from top to bottom and on the periphery of the entire state, based on the assumption that everybody within this state serves it...’ Y.Z.Chernyak, a friend of Pasternak’s, helped him to find a job. He participated in the compilation of a bibliography on Lenin, which he prepared for publication under Ed. G. Vladislavlev Institute of Lenin under the Central Committee of the CPSU (B.), Organized in 1923. Chernyak persuaded Pasternak then to take on the foreign press about Lenin. Pasternak wrote to his sister Josephine about his work: ‘... I have to read complete sets of the best magazines in three languages. You cannot even imagine how many of them are there . I often come across interesting things. I harm myself by taking my time to read them all, since I am getting paid depending on the amount of things I find and the speed.’ The People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs ministerial library with a reading room was located in apartment 12. In 1934, the Diplomatic and Consular Staff Institute was opened in the building. There is a memorial plaque on the building dedicated to G.Chicherin, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1918-1930. After the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was moved to the new high-rise building on Smolenskaya-Sennaya, the house was occupied by the Moscow City Economic Council and various ministries. The building is a valuable part of the city’s skyline.