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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 01-APR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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....

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