Nobility Assembly
The Nobility Assembly was raised between 1814 and 1820 on Mykolaivska Square, to a design by the architects Yevhen Vasilyev and Volodymyr Lobachevsky — the same square that held the Stock Exchange and the St Nicholas Cathedral. In 1814 Kharkiv's nobility resolved to build a house of their own for assemblies, raised 128,987 roubles toward it, and commissioned the project from the two architects. Completed in 1820, the neoclassical building with a high hall and a singers' gallery was adorned with cannons taken from the Kharkov Cossack fortress and consecrated that same year with a ball in honour of a visit by Emperor Alexander I. Until 1914 several hundred Kharkiv nobles met here every three years for elections and balls, alongside concerts and public lectures — among them a performance by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on 13 March 1893. The building's only pre-revolutionary rebuild followed a fire of 1870 that gutted the two-storey wing.
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the building was converted into a field hospital; in December 1917 it hosted the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets. Through the summer and autumn of 1919, when the White Armed Forces of South Russia briefly held Kharkov, it became the headquarters of Lieutenant-General V. Z. May-Mayevsky. In 1922, with Kharkov now the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsIK) — the republic's supreme legislative body — moved in. Between 1922 and 1924 the architect A. V. Linetsky expanded the building, joining it to the adjoining corner Astrakhan Hotel, whose façades the young architect G. A. Yanovitsky reworked to match the main wing. The façade was painted a pale yellow with white columns and cornices; the sver of large trees in front was cleared for a semicircular drive for cars and two flower beds. In the late 1920s a further floor was added above the central wing — and the façade acquired its dome and final Russian-classical silhouette.
After the capital of the Ukrainian SSR moved to Kyiv in 1934, the building was handed over to the first Palace of Pioneers in the USSR, which formally opened on 6 September 1935. On the eve of 1936 the first New Year tree in the Ukrainian SSR for children was lit in front of it. Two svers framed the front, and in their flower beds stood two old cannons of the Cossack fortress — the same cannons that had adorned the 1820 Assembly building, surviving 115 years and every change of regime that followed. In the great hall, 40 × 20 × 10 metres, the Pioneers heard talks by Ivan Papanin and Leonid Utyosov; the parents of Lyudmila Gurchenko — her father the accordionist, her mother the dance director — worked at the Palace, and the future actress herself danced at the pre-war New Year balls. In 1943, during the battles in which Kharkov changed hands four times, the building was heavily damaged and was not rebuilt; today its site is the pedestrian part of Constitution Square and the "Flying Ukraine" monument.
