Bolshoy Dom

Saint Petersburg, Russia

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Located at 4 Liteyny Avenue in Saint Petersburg, the Bolshoy Dom (Big House) is a Constructivist office building completed in 1931–32 on the site of the Imperial Russian Old Armoury, which burned in 1917. Designed by Soviet architects Noi Trotsky, Alexander Gegello, and Andrey Ol, the building was originally constructed as headquarters for the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, and later served the NKVD and KGB until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Now a federal cultural heritage site, it remains the headquarters of the Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast branches of the FSB. The building gained notoriety during Stalin's Great Purge as part of a larger detention complex, and has become embedded in Soviet and Russian popular culture through urban legends and conspiracy theories about secret underground levels and its survival during the Siege of Leningrad.