Lubyanka is the KGB headquarters in Moscow and one of the book’s most charged political locations. Its reputation as a place people entered without knowing whether they would leave gives it the weight of a state institution built into the city; yet Eduard Limonov’s encounters there repeatedly unsettle that fear, first through his own bravado and later through the unexpectedly ordinary manner of an officer questioning his party. The square outside supplies the counter-image: the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, emblematic of the security apparatus, is eventually toppled as Soviet power gives way.

Headquarters and reputation

The narrator identifies Lubyanka as the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, a sinister building whose very name made people turn pale. Its menace is described through uncertainty rather than a single act of violence: entering meant not knowing whether one would get out. That fearful reputation makes the building a concentrated image of state power, but Limonov’s story complicates the image. He recalls going there with his hands in his pockets, nearly whistling, and thought the Chekists less malicious than dissidents portrayed them—lethargic officials who might be won over by a good joke.

Limonov’s encounters

Lubyanka enters Limonov’s account of his departure from the Soviet Union. He says he was summoned there and recounts how an acquaintance, the daughter of Yuri Andropov, agreed to see whether her father would let her inspect the file on the poet Savenko-Limonov. A few days later, she reported its characterization of him as an antisocial malcontent and staunch anti-Soviet. The narrator leaves open whether she had actually seen the file or was teasing him. In the surrounding account, Limonov and Tanya wanted to emigrate, unlike dissidents who wished to remain in their homeland; the summons therefore sits within a story of state scrutiny that ends not in forced expulsion but in their chosen departure.

Years later, Limonov is summoned to Lubyanka again, this time by an officer responsible for the dossier on him and his party. The officer points to the grenade in the logo of the party newspaper Limonka and asks whether it incites murder. Limonov replies that the image depicts a model manufactured in Russia and that, as far as he knows, reproducing it is not prohibited. The officer laughs, gives him his mobile number, and invites him to report any young followers tempted by terrorism. Limonov accepts politely. The episode preserves the institutional setting but drains the exchange of the expected theatrical menace: the interrogation becomes a brief, almost practical negotiation between authorities and a political organizer.

The square and the collapse of authority

The building’s political meaning changes with the events outside it. After Mikhail Gorbachev signs the measure described in the narrative, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in the square in front of Lubyanka is toppled. The red flag is replaced by the tricolor of the 1917 provisional government. The headquarters remains a landmark, but its monumental companion no longer commands the square; the removal makes visible the reversal of authority that the building had long represented.

The narrative then moves from this public dismantling to the secret meeting at Belovezhskaya Forest, where Boris Yeltsin and the Ukrainian and Belarusian presidents agree that the Soviet Union no longer exists. Lubyanka is not the site of that decision, but the sequence places its toppled statue within the same unmaking of the Soviet state. Across Limonov’s two summonses and the statue’s fall, the location shifts from an apparently invulnerable center of surveillance to a headquarters whose surrounding symbols can be challenged and removed.