The Building of the Central Energy Customs of the Federal Customs Service
On the corner of Prechistenka Street and Vsevolozhsky Lane, in an avenue of Moscow streets that preserve the spirit of the city’s old aristocratic quarters, stands an elegant corner building. Today this architectural monument houses the staff of the Central Energy Customs, yet behind its restrained façades lies more than a century of history filled with creative gatherings, musical evenings, and literary salons. Established in May 1994 as the Energy Customs, the agency was reorganised in 2000 and granted central status. Over the years it changed locations several times before finding its permanent home in February 2002 at 9 Prechistenka. The building itself had been transferred to the State Customs Committee much earlier: by a Presidential Decree of the Russian Federation dated 22 January 1992, it was included among the properties designated for the central apparatus of the service. The five‑storey corner building, with façades facing Prechistenka (known in Soviet times as Kropotkinskaya Street) and Vsevolozhsky Lane, was erected in 1910. The design is commonly attributed to the talented architect Nikolai Ivanovich Zherikhov, whose name is inscribed in the golden pages of Moscow Art Nouveau. Zherikhov, known for his fondness for stucco and sculptural decoration, created more than forty tenement houses and several public buildings; this mansion became one of his gems. Unlike many of his works executed in capricious Art Nouveau, the house built for the merchant and hereditary honoured citizen Evdokia Andronikovna Kostyakova is designed in an elegant Neoclassical style. The façade’s particular solemnity is enhanced by sculptural panels with antique subjects adorning the second floor, lending the house a museum‑like charm. Yet it is not only the architecture that makes this building unique. For decades its walls have echoed the voices of Russia’s greatest musicians. In its spacious apartments lived the outstanding composer and pianist Alexander Goldenveizer, whose flat became a magnet for Moscow’s musical elite. His guests included Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Taneyev, and Nikolai Medtner – names that defined the glory of the Russian piano school. In the 1920s, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov also frequently visited this house, calling on his friend, the artist Boris Shaposhnikov. A master of the brush, Shaposhnikov is known as the creator of memorial museums: Pushkin’s flat on the Moyka in St Petersburg and the museum of noble life at Sobachya Ploshchadka in Moscow. Thus, bypassing epochs and changing owners, Kostyakova’s luxurious tenement house has become a state institution. Today the Central Energy Customs, housed within these walls, continues its history, organically uniting the dry bureaucracy of a modern agency with the living breath of the Silver Age, forever captured in stone and in the memories of contemporaries.
Address: Moscow, Prechistenka St., 9
