Embassy history

“So, on October 27, 1932, I arrived in London as the new Ambassador of the USSR in the UK. I had to urgently familiarize myself with the conditions of my post. And I started with our Embassy building.

When in 1929 the Soviet Embassy arrived in London, after the second Labour government had restored diplomatic relations between the UK and the USSR, it found itself without a home: as I have already mentioned, the Embassy building we had inherited from the Tsarist regime was leased and the lease expired in 1928 when the British-Soviet relations broke down. Therefore, initially, the Embassy settled in temporarily at 40 Grosvenor Square. The search for a permanent residence began in earnest and immediately. This proved to be a tall order. Anti-Soviet sentiment in conservative circles (and all landlords were Tories) was still very strong. S.B. Kagan [Kagan, Samuyl Bentsyanovich, Counsellor of the Soviet Embassy in the UK], who bore the main burden of finding a home for the Soviet mission, experienced severe disappointment dozens of times. He seemed to have found suitable premises, arranged all the details with an agent (in England, transactions with houses and apartments are made through agent's offices), everything ready to move in next week and then suddenly, at the very last moment, the owner of the house, learning that the tenants were “Bolsheviks”, would flatly refuse to close the deal. Other times, the agent would agree, the house owner would agree, but the owner of the land on which the house stands (often two different people) did not, and the deal crumbled. 

Finally, a South African wool millionaire, Sir Lewis Richardson, agreed to let his mansion in Kensington to the Soviet government. What motives drove Richardson, I do not know. It was rumored that his losses in the global crisis of 1929 helped him overcome his political prejudice. Maybe that was indeed the case. The land on which the mansion stood belonged to the King, and the King, who had just restored diplomatic relations with the USSR, naturally could not object to a Soviet Embassy being located there. Richardson was letting the mansion for 60 years and demanded an advance rent payment for the entire period. It was a harsh and an unusual condition, but the Embassy agreed to it. As a result, for 36 thousand pounds, the Soviet government came into possession of a beautiful mansion in one of the most fashionable streets of London until 1990. In the end, it was even quite a bargain, especially considering that our street was known in London vernacular as the millionaires' quarter.

Immediately upon my arrival I began to get acquainted with the new residence. It led to a discovery of many details: some pleasant, some unpleasant, some amusing, but all of them very English.

About a hundred years ago, the land on which the Embassy house stood belonged to Kensington Palace. Back in the day, then a country residence of kings in 17^th and 18^th centuries, this palace used to play a major role. It was home to Queen Anne, King George I, and King George II. The kings later moved to London and Kensington Palace became the home of the youngest members of the royal family. Queen Victoria was born and raised there. Queen Mary, the wife of George V, who reigned at the time of my arrival, was also born here. In 1841, an Act of Parliament divided 28 acres (about 11 hectares) of the kitchen garden from the Kensington palace's gardens; later, our street emerged there, gradually occupied by two rows of rich mansions. Our Embassy house was among them.

The house was wonderfully located. When I used to work there, it stood on a small green plot of about a quarter of an acre, facing Kensington Palace Gardens, with a lovely garden behind it complete with a greenhouse, a fountain, a sundial, and a tennis court. There were no tall trees, but there were roses in bloom, and the hedge was overgrown with thick tall shrubs. Behind the hedge was a fenced field for Sunday football games, and beyond it lay the famous Kensington Gardens, perhaps the finest of London's parks.

The street where the Embassy building stood was generously studded with giant hundred-year-old trees. This wasn’t a regular street, but a special private one, considered the property of those who had their houses there. No regular traffic was allowed through, and only visitors of the mansions could drive on it; but even they had to obey a speed limit of 12 miles per hour. Iron gates guarded both ends of the street, with watchmen in gold livery and tall cylinders always on duty. At midnight the gates were locked, and one had to pass by the watchman to enter our street.

Of course, these colorful remnants of a bygone era had a price: the watchmen needed paying, the gates needed mending, the lazy chubby dog, supposedly guarding us from the nocturnal dangers, needed feeding. However, no one grumbled: the English like to preserve the vestiges of the past. And there were real Englishmen living in our street, and what a lot of them! Just opposite the Embassy was a house occupied by an English Rothschild. Not far away stood the stone mansion of Leslie Urquhart, the very one who had the richest non-ferrous metals concessions in Tsarist Russia, and who after the revolution became one of the greatest enemies of the Soviet regime. A little farther away was the lovely house of the Duke of Marlborough.

S.B. Kagan recounted that when the owners of the street had learned of the impending invasion of the “Bolsheviks”, they protested to the palace department, but were unsuccessful. However, the lease signed by the Embassy included a clause to the effect that the house we rented could not be used for purposes that would cause too many people to appear at Kensington Palace Gardens. As a result, we had to open a consulate general elsewhere, though not very far away, at 3 Rosary Gardens in South Kensington. This was the subject of a lengthy dispute between the Embassy in London and the Narkomindel in Moscow. The Central Office could not grasp the intricacies of our street situation and, in the interests of frugality, demanded that the consulate be moved onto the Embassy premises. And when we argued that such a move was impossible, Moscow thought that we simply wanted to enjoy more space and were inventing some bizarre pretext for doing so.

The Embassy House was built in 1852 by Stanhope, 5^th Earl of Harrington. This was a time when the green fields still stretched between Kensington and Westminster, and Earl of Harrington’s carriage would often get stuck in the mud on his way from home to Parliament. The Harrington family owned the house until World War I, then it quickly changed hands until eventually became the property of the already mentioned Lewis Richardson. Nevertheless, it still had the inscription “Harrington House” on the gate, and it was only when I was there that it was painted over and replaced by the number 13, much to the horror of the neighbours, as the English are superstitious, and almost always houses that have this “unlucky” number are marked with a name rather than a number.

Inside, the house was unlike any ordinary English house. In the center, there was a large double height hall, lined with dark carved oak. A broad oak staircase led up to a similar balustrade that encircled the hall. A white ballroom adjoined the oak hall below, followed by a small gray drawing-room and a beautiful conservatory with palm trees and sculptural decorations. All these reception rooms were full of antique furniture, marble tables, decorative vases, and other ornaments brought from St. Petersburg palaces. Down there beside me was the Ambassador's study, which overlooked the garden, as well as the offices of the Counsellor and the First secretary.

On the second floor, there was a series of rooms around the oak hall, some for lodging, some for Embassy needs. Two smaller corner rooms with windows facing the street ¾ the yellow living room and the brown dining room ¾ were set up for more intimate receptions. Here we usually hosted teas or breakfasts for individual guests or for small groups. On the other side of the oak room, looking out over the Embassy garden and with a wonderful view of Kensington Gardens, was the Ambassador's apartment. It consisted of three rather odd rooms. We made a bedroom in one side room, my private study in the other side room, and the middle room, a long barn-like high-ceilinged room, became our dining-room and home drawing-room at the same time. My wife spent considerable time and effort to create some semblance of coziness in it, and in the end, she seemed to have succeeded. We later cut through the wall in the dining room to make a balcony overlooking the garden. Of course, there were stairs in our apartment. You can't imagine an English house without stairs altogether. The British assure us that running up and down the stairs prevents rheumatism, so common in their country. I leave that assertion on their conscience. In our apartment, the middle room and the two outer rooms were located on different levels: to get from the dining room to the bedroom or the study, one had to go down several stairs.

On the third floor of the Embassy building, which had up to a dozen small rooms, lived mostly the technical personnel who had to necessarily reside at the Embassy. There was a small outbuilding in the courtyard, usually serving as the quarters of chauffeurs and cleaners.

Overall, the house was much better than Chesham House, but still, it did not quite meet our requirements. And no wonder: Harrington House was the home of a prominent English magnate. In later years, it usually housed four members of the Richardson family and seventeen members of the staff. Everything in the house was adapted to this occupancy. The needs of the Soviet Embassy were quite different. Besides, Harrington House was not large enough: only about 30 rooms. Later, especially during the war, when the workload and the number of staff increased, we had to rent additional houses.

In those days of late 1932, however, we liked the Embassy house very much. And the beautiful Kensington Gardens were one of its main delights. A five-minute walk from the Embassy and we were already walking under the century-old beeches and lime trees. We wandered for hours, admiring the flowerbeds and looking at its attractions. We spent most of the time near the lovely Round Pond, where there were always so many ducks and seagulls and where the old and the young were launching toy ships and boats. It was always lively, fun, lots of playful running around, children's screams and laughter. My wife with her typical temperament used to quickly join in the spirit around the Round Pond. She was especially excited about the paper kites, as many were being launched around this place. Once she even bought herself such a toy. However, that endeavour never took off the ground: after all, she was somewhat bound by the position of an «Ambassadress»...

Kensington Palace stood there, a stone's throw from the Round Pond, sombre and half-forgotten like an old, retired courtier. No one lived in it, and for a sixpence fee anyone could walk around its halls which bore the distant glow of a bygone era.

Yes, in those first days at the Embassy I was pleased with my new residence, especially with the silence that reigned around it. It was quiet in the shade of Kensington's centennial trees. It was quiet in the sky, where no aircraft had yet appeared. It was quiet out in the private street. The roar of a thousand voices of the global city did not reach here, into this fashionable millionaires' quarter. And often, standing with my wife at the window of our apartment, I repeated with a mixed feeling of amazement and joy: It’s just like in the countryside”.

1953 Embassy of the USSR. The sailors of the cruiser "Sverdlov" arrived at the coronation of Elizabeth II