Versailles (hotel)

Pre-Revolutionary Time

The history of the Versailles Hotel began in 1907 , when the Vladivostok City Government assigned a land plot for the construction of the building to a large sugar industrialist, a merchant of the 2nd Guild L. S. Radomyshelsky. The building project was created by the famous architect I.V. Meshkov in Vladivostok, who had previously built more than one building in the historic city center. It was planned to place commercial premises on the ground floor, and “furnished rooms” and a kitchen on the upper floors. Two years later, on January 16, 1909, the building was consecrated and began to function as a hotel; on the ground floor, the confectionery, grocery and haberdashery shops of the Churin & Co. Trade House opened ^[1] . At different times, this building housed the famous bohemian cafe "Do not Cry!", A public dining room at low prices, a private theater, a French clothing store, "Breeze and Daniel", in the basement there was a barbecue "Good of the Caucasus" ^[2] . Until 1917, Versailles remained the most prestigious and expensive hotel in the city ^[1] .

On April 4, 1918, two employees of the Japanese trading company Ishida were killed in a hotel. This provocation became a formal occasion for the Japanese intervention in Primorye. On the same day, a Japanese landing under the cover of the cannons of the American cruiser "Brooklyn" landed in Vladivostok.

In one of the hotel rooms, the ruler of Siberia, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, lived with his beloved Anna Timireva .

Soviet time

In February – April 1920, the Military Council of the Primorsky Region worked here, which included S. Lazo ^[3] . In 1924, the hotel building was nationalized and transferred to the city farm. Until 1935, the hotel retained its former name ^[1] .

On June 7, members of the Chelyuskin expedition arrived in Vladivostok, brought from Smolensk and Stalingrad by steamboats from Lavrentiy Bay . Heroes-polar explorers, as well as pilots and sailors who saved the expedition, settled in the Versailles Hotel. In memory of this sensational event in 1935, the Versailles Hotel was renamed Chelyuskin ^[4] . The restaurant at the hotel was called Vladivostok, and only at the end of the 1970s it was renamed Chelyuskin.

Post-Soviet Time

In 1989, a severe fire broke out in the hotel, which completely destroyed the historic interior of the building. In 1991, the emergency building was transferred to the Far Eastern Shipping Company, and in 1992 reconstruction began, during which the building was restored according to the preserved sketches and photographs ^[1] . Currently, the hotel has 12 single, 26 double rooms and 3 "suites" ^[5] .

In the 1990s, the hotel was returned to its original name. It is an object of cultural heritage of the Russian Federation (code 2510042000) ^[6] .

The author of the famous cycle of novels about the Soviet intelligence officer Isaev ( Stirlitz ) Julian Semenov lived in Vladivostok at the Chelyuskin Hotel for some time and here he came up with the image of his main character. In the first novel, “Password is not needed,” Isaev works in Vladivostok and at the Versailles Hotel he meets his future wife Sashenka. According to the head of the workshop of monumental art, Alexander Boyko, it is planned to erect a monument to Stirlitz near the hotel ^[7] .

“When he asked the liaison officer to wait, he decided that he would write to Sasha now. Visions flashed before his eyes: his first meeting with her in the Versailles restaurant in Vladivostok, and a walk along the shore of the bay, their first walk on a stuffy August day, when it began to rain in the morning and the sky became heavy, lilac, with reddish edges and very white, as if red-hot, distances that seemed like a molten continuation of the sea. "