Grand Hotel
The most fashionable hotel of pre-revolutionary Kharkiv.
The Grand Hotel opened in 1907 as pre-revolutionary Kharkiv's most fashionable address. Art Nouveau with neoclassical accents, glass-walled Otis elevators, steam heating, a telegraph in the lobby and a hundred-line telephone exchange — every detail spoke of metropolitan luxury. The ground floor housed a restaurant with a resident orchestra, the second a billiard room, the basement the Empire cinema — one of the first in the city to show pictures with a live pianist accompanying.
Over the following decade the Grand Hotel became the address of every name that came to Kharkiv: Fyodor Chaliapin stayed here on his tours through the South-Russian Opera; Anna Pavlova's ballet company lodged here between performances; in the restaurant the governor held banquets for the foreign industrialists who came to invest in Kharkiv's machine-building plants. Merchants from Moscow, Kyiv, Warsaw and Rostov-on-Don made themselves at home — the hotel was the informal cabinet of Kharkiv's business elite at the turn of the 20th century.
Nationalised in 1919, the hotel was first turned into a dormitory for the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, and then into the Kharkiv headquarters of the Comintern; in Soviet years the building itself was renamed the Spartak Hotel. The move of the capital to Kyiv in 1934 stripped the centre of attention, and parts of the building were converted into communal apartments. The bombings of 1941—1943 destroyed the main volume — of the Art Nouveau with its coquettish oriels nothing remained but a pile of brick. Post-war construction never returned the Grand to its old spot; its silhouette survives only on pre-revolutionary postcards.
