Lubanski's Distillery in Minsk Closed by Secret Building, Featuring Interrogation Rooms and a Document Incineration Facility
At the beginning of summer, city residents rejoiced at the restored brick facades of the pre-revolutionary factory on Mayakovsky Street, hoping for a new cultural venue to emerge there. However, very quickly, a five-story secret facility for security forces, equipped with surveillance devices and a giant shooting range, grew in front of the historical monument's main facade.
In June, Belarusian media reported that the walls of Eustachy Lubanski's yeast and distillery plant, built in 1903 on Mayakovsky Street, had begun to be cleaned of Soviet paint. Rumors circulated that a restaurant might appear there.
But the hopes did not materialize. At that time, the main part of the so-called "reconstruction" (a word that has completely discredited itself in Belarusian legal realities) was not yet visible. This involved the erection of a huge new building under this guise, which not only adjoins the small two-story historical building but rises as a wall literally right in front of its main facade, completely obscuring the monument from Mayakovsky Street.
This massive structure has risen literally in recent months. According to an annex to Minsk's investment program, 31 million rubles have been allocated for the work. This year, builders are to master 6 million, and the main financial injection of 25 million rubles is planned for 2027. However, these budget funds are not going towards the restoration of pre-revolutionary heritage at all.
What kind of secret object is being built on Mayakovsky Street in Minsk
The construction of the facility is accompanied by unprecedented secrecy measures. The plot for this complex is completely absent from the Public Cadastral Map. The general designer is the "Minskproekt" institute, which traditionally designs special facilities of various levels of secrecy, including the new building of the Academy of National Security, which is under the jurisdiction of the KGB of Belarus, directly on the historical Zalatagorsk Cemetery, and the controversial houses in the Lebyadziny microdistrict.
Most project materials, including key sections of architectural solutions (AS) and the general plan (GP), are missing from government procurement tenders. All information about the internal layout and purpose is obtained exclusively from tenders for various adjacent communications, where plans with room schedules appear in the technical documentation.
The official name lacks any specifics — "Reconstruction of a building of undetermined purpose into an administrative and economic building." There is no information about who the building is intended for, even within the available documentation.
The new facility is a massive five-story complex with a complex "d"-shaped plan, the long part of which stretches from Mayakovsky Street to the Svislach embankment, next to Lubanski's factory. The trapezoidal courtyard, which completely obscures the historical building from the main facade, is almost enclosed, except for a two-story through opening in the wing directly facing the architectural monument.
The building's layout is corridor-based, with numerous small offices, approximately 3x6 m in size, arranged on both sides. Such cramped offices typically accommodate two workstations, a wardrobe, and a couple of chairs for visitors.
The most interesting in terms of functional purpose is the ground floor, divided into three isolated sections.
The first, utility section, is located in the wing closer to Svislach. Here are a garage with three car bays, a workshop for their maintenance and repair, rooms for staff and drivers, as well as specialists who will service the new building. Part of the industrial and utility rooms of the garage is located on the mezzanine.
The most distinctive feature here is the room for document destruction — a single-story annex (26.3 m²), built with its own structures and adjoining the far corner of the new building.
Next to the utility section is a shooting range. Around it are rooms for storing targets and cleaning weapons, a training classroom, a duty shift room, and an officer's lounge.
The more than 50-meter-long shooting gallery (461.4 m² in area) is standard for shooting ranges, but in the layout of an administrative building, such a massive facility, which together with additional rooms occupies almost half of the floor, looks quite unusual.
Also connected to the shooting range is a small medical unit with a doctor's office, a waiting room for outpatients, and treatment-vaccination and physiotherapy rooms.
The main entrance to the administrative part of the building is located in the north-western corner of the building. To the right of the entrance, beyond the turnstiles, is a spacious lobby with elevators and a staircase, as well as utility rooms: cloakrooms, changing rooms, and showers.
The wing to the left of the entrance has a more interesting structure. Immediately beyond the entrance group, in the first closed section, there are three interrogation rooms, a basic interrogation room, opposite them - a polygraph room, two "FIN" offices and a "FIN" reception area (we do not know what this acronym stands for).
Behind the doors of the second section are four investigator offices, a waiting room, and a separate room for temporary storage of material evidence.
Deepest within, in the corner part of this wing, behind yet another door, is the operational-situational headquarters ("OSH" on the drawing).
Adjoining the staff hall is a hall, separated by a sliding partition and raised by three steps, with an office and a waiting room. Grouped on other sides are an operational-investigative measures ("OIM" on the drawing) office, separated by a glass partition, a group management office, a server room, and an "IBM" office (acronym expansion unknown).
Further on are a dining room, toilets, and a large lobby with a back exit to the inner courtyard.
There are no specific rooms on the upper floors, mostly offices. On the second floor, directly above the garage, there is a large gym with changing rooms and showers. And one level higher, on the third floor, a full-fledged games hall with a combined basketball and mini-football court is designed. Such a multi-story sports and utility block further emphasizes the financial scale and status of the department.
Also on the second floor is an assembly hall, designed for 255 seats and with a large foyer. Another large meeting room for approximately 60 people is planned on the fourth floor. From the same part of the building on the second floor, a transitional gallery is designed to connect the new building with the historical one. The functional content of the architectural monument in this complex is currently unknown.
The fifth floor remains purely technical.
The building will be restored, but the monument is over
And how did it happen that such a massive building could be constructed with such a shameful disregard for an architectural monument? As in the case of the KGB construction, which violates approved protection zones for historical and cultural value, the detailed planning project, and the law on burial matters, the answer is simple: "sometimes laws don't matter."
The project for the protection zones of Lubanski's yeast and distillery plant was approved by the Ministry of Culture in 2015. Comparing this document with what is happening today in this place shows how easily heritage protection legislation is circumvented in Belarus.
The area around the former Lubanski factory is divided into several sections with different regulations. The strictest of these is the protected zone, where new construction of buildings and structures is strictly prohibited. However, this norm proved absolutely powerless against bureaucratic cunning: the massive building passes as a "reconstruction of a building of undetermined purpose," not new construction, which means no regulation prohibits building it to absolutely any size.
The new building is also located in a development regulation zone, which is specifically established so that new constructions do not overpower the monument and destroy its visual perception. Construction is underway directly on the territory of the first maintenance regime, where it is forbidden to erect buildings higher than 5.5 meters from ground level to the roof ridge. The five-story complex exceeds the legally permitted norm by almost four times.
The long wing of the new building also stretched from Mayakovsky Street to the Svislach embankment exactly along the landscape protection zone, where not only construction but also the alteration of the landscape's character is strictly prohibited.
Despite the fact that the historical walls themselves are being restored, Lubanski's factory as a historical monument effectively ceases to exist. For a long time, it was believed worldwide that a monument could exist outside its historical environment. But when, after the war, old buildings around cathedrals and other significant structures were demolished and replaced with modernist boxes, it became clear that this was a mistake. The environment acts as a natural "frame": it reveals the artistic concept and historical significance of the monument.
What is happening on Mayakovsky Street is one of those urban planning mistakes that are most difficult to correct. These are mistakes of the same kind that were made in Soviet times: five-story buildings around cathedrals, glass skyscrapers, and through highways across historical developments - none of this has been corrected even half a century later.
Such architectural arrogance, where the historical building obviously just hindered the development, and wasn't demolished despite its protected status only through a compromise of completely ignoring the protection zones, leads one to wonder: could it be this powerful security structure that initiated the global cleansing of the State List of Historical and Cultural Values from architectural monuments, which recently became known?
«Nasha Niva» — the bastion of Belarus
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