It is a large Neo-Baroque building with a facade of yellow brick designed by Alexander V. Ivanov in 1897 and augmented by Aleksey Shchusev from 1940 to 1947.

Belying its massiveness, the edifice avoids an impression of heroic scale: isolated Palladian and Baroque details, such as the minute pediments over the corner bays and the central loggia, are lost in an endlessly repeating palace facade where three bands of cornices emphasize the horizontal lines.

[3] In Soviet Russian jokes, it was referred to as "the tallest building in Moscow", since Siberia (a euphemism for the Gulag labour camp system) could be seen from its basement.

By 1947, his new design had doubled Lubyanka's size[4] horizontally, with the original structure taking up the left half of the facade (as viewed from the street).

[9] In 1957, Russia's largest toy shop opened on the opposite side of Lubyanka Square, where a medieval cannon foundry was previously located.

Secret police chiefs from Lavrenty Beria to Andropov used the same office on the third floor, which looked down on the statue of Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky.

A prison on the ground floor of the building figures prominently in a book written by the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.

Famous inmates held, tortured and interrogated there include Sidney Reilly, Greville Wynne, Raoul Wallenberg, Ion Antonescu, Osip Mandelstam, Genrikh Yagoda, János Esterházy, Alexander Dolgun, Rochus Misch, and Walter Ciszek.

A museum of the KGB (now called Историко-демонстрационный зал ФСБ России, Historical Demonstration hall of the Russian FSB) was opened to the public.

[14] Hitler's personal Golden Party Badge, which was discovered by the Red Army after the capture of Berlin, was stored in the Lubyanka.

Although the roof of the building was not protected, representatives of the Moscow Department of Cultural Heritage stated that the project was not approved and the reconstruction was carried out without proper documentation.

[21][22] In November 2016, the artist Petr Pavlensky held an action - setting fire to the main entrance of the building as a protest "against continuous terror."