Kharkiv

The Palace of Labor is a special building in the architectural ensemble of the Constitution Square, an architectural and urban planning monument of local significance.

It was built in 1916 according to the project of architect Hippolytus Pretro. Initially, it was a tenement house of the Insurance Company "Russia". The building, which combined art nouveau and neoclassicism styles, had six floors, two "internal" buildings and three courtyards, which performed a function of a transit between the current Pavlovska Square, Kvitka-Osnovyanenko Street and Constitution Square. On the ground floor there were shops and the rest of the floors had five six- and eight-room apartments, which, according to the European real estate market, were rented for very large sum of money.

After the seizure of power in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks declared this house state property. Since then, there has been the All-Ukrainian Council of Trade Unions, as well as the People's Commissariat of Labor, after which the modern name appeared - the Palace of Labor.

In the 1930s, the times of Stalin's terror came, when the Soviet authorities exterminated the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The repressions did not bypass the architect Pretro — in 1937 he was shot by the Soviet authorities. But his creation continued its life: the Palace of Labor survived both the Red Terror and the German occupation.

On March 2, a Russian missile strike on the Constitution Square damaged the facades, windows, roof, as well as the interiors of the Palace of Labor. As a result of the destruction, the exposition of the newly created Museum of the History of Pharmacy, which was located in this building, was destroyed.