Meyendorff Castle

The house that carries the Meyendorff name was not begun by a Meyendorff. Building was initiated by Nadezhda, daughter of General A. B. Kazakov, and the work between 1874 and 1885 was designed and directed by Pyotr Samoylovich Boytsov, in the late-nineteenth-century fashion for imitating the French châteaux of the early sixteenth century. Nadezhda's sister Vera was the mother-in-law of General Mannerheim.

The castle was finished by 1885, and a year later Kazakova married E. A. Verigin, a colonel of the General Staff. He did not enjoy it long. In 1891 he fell into the cold water of the Baltic while retrieving documents that had gone overboard from a ship, took a chill and died.

In 1904 the widow married again, to Baron Mikhail Feliksovich Meyendorff of an old Baltic German house, a cadet line of the noble House of Uexküll, and the estate took his name. Four years later Baron F. M. Meyendorff entered the diplomatic service under Baron Karl Karlovich Buksgevden, the Russian ambassador to Denmark, holding the rank of state advisor, equivalent to a colonel, as first secretary of the Russian diplomatic mission there. It was a coveted posting: the mother of Nicholas II, Maria Fyodorovna, had been born Princess Dagmar of Denmark.

In 1914 the Meyendorffs went abroad for medical treatment and remained there through the First World War. The revolution and the civil war that followed ended any hope of returning to the estate.

After the October Revolution Lenin lived and worked in the castle for a time, and other Bolshevik leaders occupied it with him. It then held a colony for the orphaned children of Red Army men until 1935, when the grounds of the former noble estate were made over into an exclusive sanatorium under the USSR Council of Ministers. Mikhail Bulgakov, Sergey Korolyov and Yuri Gagarin were among those who took treatment or rest at Barvikha.

During the Great Patriotic War the castle served as a hospital, and a soldiers' cemetery was laid out in the park. It was later marked by a reduced copy, made by the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich himself, of his Mamayev monument to the battle of Stalingrad, the figure of the grieving mother.

The castle's second life began with a conversation. Visiting the châteaux of the Loire in 2002, Vladimir Putin heard Jacques Chirac observe that Russia had nothing to compare with them, and instructed his staff to find a castle near Moscow and restore it. Barvikha lay twenty minutes from the city. A full restoration followed in 2003–2004 to a design by the architectural bureau Dom-A, under Sergey Makushev and Maria Serebryanaya, and the estate passed to the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, which remodelled the 1,300-square-metre manor to be the grandest in Russia.

It opened for use in November 2008, and from that month the president's official site has used the name State Residence Barvikha, though RIA Novosti, Echo Moscow and other outlets kept to Meyendorf Manor. On 2 November 2008 the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia signed here the declaration on Nagorno-Karabakh that took the house's name. Dmitry Medvedev lived mainly at Barvikha as president while Gorky-9, fifteen kilometres from Moscow, was under renovation, moving there once the work was done.