Pashkov’s house

From Moscowiki

This masterpiece of Russian classicism, built in 1784-1785, has its legends. According to one of them an incredibly gifted architect Vasily Bazhenov was not allowed to reconstruct Kremlin and to build a palace for Catherine the Great and got quite offended. So he decided to build a beautiful palace right opposite Kremlin but to turn it a little bit so that Kremlin would face the back part of the building. Another legend says that on the top of this palace grateful King of Prussia bowed to Moscow for saving his country from Napoleon. Some say that under Pashkov’s house there was a secret passage from Kremlin to Zamoskvorechye district. In 1839 Pashkov’s house was bought by the state and several years later collections of the Russian State Library were transferred here: 28000 books, 700 manuscripts and nearly 1500 geographical maps. Now Russian State Library (“Biblioteka imeni Lenina” or simply “Leninka”), which is one of the top three biggest libraries in the world, stores its collections in the nearby building erected in 1928-1930 by architects V.Schuko and V. Gelfreikh.