Word: oak
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...main Oak Hall, a spacious room paneled in that wood also features a massive oak staircase built without nails. The stairs lead to the balcony and to sitting rooms hidden behind beautifully carved wooden grilles that allowed privileged guests to spy on those below...
...Moscow legend has it that the Oak Hall sheltered an influential Masonic lodge for the cream of Russian nobility. There is no doubt that it was the scene of the most spectacular Moscow high-society balls. Attending one such gathering, Czar Alexander III stumbled walking down that staircase and broke his ankle...
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the mansion served as a shelter for the homeless until 1934 when Stalin turned it over to the recently formed Union of Soviet Writers (USW). The Oak Hall became the most coveted, élitist and inexpensive restaurant in the country. Stalin himself visited on occasion, but it was a regular haunt for Lavrenti Beria, his secret police henchman notoriously given to perfidy, cruelty and lust...
...would dine in one of the hidden rooms upstairs and choose his next female victim from among those in the dining room. The count's bedroom across the lobby from the Oak Hall became the USW party committee room, where many a writer was read trumped-up charges before being shipped to the camps or expelled from...
...entire history of Soviet literature played out in the Oak Hall, where loyal literary functionaries and dissident writers ate, drank and often fought. It was there that foreign VIPs were brought to rub shoulders with selected members of the intelligentsia. At the height of Gorbachev's perestroika in 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan met there with dissident Soviet writers...