Public security

Shorn of Prejudices, the Lubyanka Shooting Is a Familiar Story

The Lubyanka is not a fortress. As anyone who has walked past its façade knows, the Lubyanka is distinctly light on armed guards at the doors, gates and secure perimeters. There are the by now ubiquitous blocks there to prevent the building being rammed by a vehicle, and always a distinct density of DPS traffic police who might not be traffic police after all, but otherwise there is nothing to prevent anyone entering. Even when artist and political activist Petr Pavlensky set light to one of the Lubyanka’s doors one night in 2015, all they did was fit a new door. In this respect it is more like MI5’s Thames House headquarters than MI6’s rather more showy Vauxhall Cross building, enclosed as it is within a cage of bars, gates, cameras and armed guards.

Of course, go beyond the doors and the anteroom within is where the real perimeter security begins, as Manyurov apparently discovered. Whether because it can rely on its formidable reputation — this was a building in which, back in the darkest Soviet days, “enemies of the people” were tortured to death in its basements, or gunned down in its courtyard – or to make a point about being part of the nation, the FSB, like the KGB, does not hide from view.