The residence of American ambassadors.

Location
Beyond the place depicted by Vasily Polenov there is a neo-classical mansion aka Spaso House. The name was taken from Spasopeskovskaya Square, in the Arbat District  (see the previous post "Where the legend was born"). Not far from the American Embassy grounds, Spaso House sits just off the garden ring road that passed the old American Embassy and is a few short block from Arbat. The great hall is 82 feet long with a domed ceiling that holds the largest Russian crystal house chandelier in Moscow.

Neoclassical Revival building
It was one of the mansions confiscated by the communists during the Russian Revolution of 1917.  Spaso House had been completed only three years earlier in 1914 by wealthy banker, munitions dealer and textile merchant Nikolay Aleksandrovich Vtorov. He commissioned the architects Vladimir Adamovich and Vladimir Mayat, two prominent advocates of the neoclassical style, to build the new mansion.


As a student, Adamovich had worked with F.O. Shekhel, the master of Russian Art Nouveau in the early 1900s. They chose the "New Empire" style, which was popular with the Russian business class. The exterior of the house was influenced by the Gagarin House, a fine example of the Muscovite Empire Style, which had been built in the 1820s by Joseph Bové.

 The residence of the U.S. Ambassador

After 1917 all mansions in Moscow were expropriated and used for government commissars and high level officials. Georgiy Vasiliyevich Chicherin, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs occupied Spaso House during the 1920s. When America established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, William Bullitt was assigned as the Ambassador. Bullitt was shown three buildings allocated for his use as a residence and Spaso House was chosen.

Ambassador Bullitt was able to move into Spaso House in March 1934. The Embassy chancery and some staff were housed at Spaso House on an interim basis until further accommodations could be found.
The beginning of this "honeymoon" period saw two memorable parties at Spaso House. The first was the Christmas party of 1934, described in "Bears in the Caviar", at which three trained seals from the Moscow Zoo came into the room balancing a Christmas tree, a tray of glasses, and a bottle of champagne. When the performance ended, the seal's trainer, who had been drinking, passed out, and the seals galloped free throughout the house..
The second was the Spring Festival of 1935, described by Irena Wiley in "Around the Globe in 20 Years" as "the only one great party in Moscow of the USSR." The famous writer Mikhail Bulgakov attended the ball which inspired the scene of the masked ball in "The Master and Margarita". The animals borrowed again from the Moscow Zoo for the Christmas party caused a number of calamities: An unhousebroken baby bear ruined a Soviet general's uniform, and hundreds of finches, also not housebroken, flew noisily about the high-ceilinged rooms during the party and for days thereafter.
A musicale hosted by Ambassador Bullitt during the summer of 1935 was another memorable event. As later recalled by the then chief of the consular section, Angus Wird, guests in the newly completed ballroom witnessed Sergei Prokofiev conducting his own composition, the opera "The Love for Three Oranges".
From March to April 1947, Spaso House was the site of a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, including Secretary fo State George Marshall, who met in Moscow to draft the final peace treaties with Germany and Austria.

They say that some American children playing in Spaso House had gone into the basement and found a passageway leading out under the square at the front of the house. It seems that the pre-Revolutionary merchant who built the house, Nikolai Vtorov, had already taken notice of the revolutionary unrest that was filling the main streets of Moscow only a few blocks from his house, and he had provided an escape route for him and his family when the revolution arrived at his front door. His plans did not work out, however; Vtorov was shot and killed by a revolutionary before he could make it to the escape route.