Moscow postcard: a church for Lubyanka.(The Talk of the Town)( headquarters of the K.G.B.)

For decades, a statue of "Iron" Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of Lenin's secret police, glowered over the Moscow traffic swarming past Lubyanka, the squat, yellow headquarters of the K.G.B. Then, on an August night in 1991, steel cables were wrapped around Dzerzhinsky's neck, and he was lifted up by a crane and suspended in the air; that tableau, that triumphant gallows, was the enduring image of the last hours of the Soviet empire. Ever since, Lubyanka Square has been changing; the shabby old Soviet food store behind the K.G.B.'s main building has become a posh supermarket, part of a chain called the Seventh Continent -- a sinister, though unconscious, reminder of the Gulag Archipelago.

The K.G.B. is now known as the F.S.B., but its compound looks eerily unchanged: a few blocks of huge, oppressive buildings. As before, the walls outside bear no identification, no sign, no banner, nothing but a plaque honoring Yuri Andropov. But in early March a new sign appeared, a shiny copper plaque, outside the F.S.B., informing passersby that the "Church of Sophia the Divine Wisdom . . . in Lubyanka was re-created upon the blessing of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and by the zeal of the Federal Security Service." Curious. A church inside Lubyanka. The Russian Orthodox Church and the state security service do not appear to be a good match, given that tens of thousands of bishops, priests, monks, and nuns were imprisoned and executed under Lenin and Stalin. "It is necessary to conduct a ...