Presidential Palace of Tiraspol

The Supreme Council building stands at the historical centre of Tiraspol, approached by a broad flight of marble steps. It was erected in 1983 as the headquarters of the Tiraspol City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. a gorkom building, not a seat of government, which gives its scale a particular quality of institutional ambition. Designed by architect A.V. Norolsky, the structure comprises a seven-storey central block connected to two five-storey wings, and can be considered one of the clearest expressions of late Soviet architectural style in Pridnestrovie. After the Soviet collapse the building briefly housed a branch of the state university before assuming its current function in 1991, when it became the seat of the Supreme Council: the parliament of the newly declared Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Since 2012, it also houses the government of the PMR and is considered one of the defining symbols of Pridnestrovian statehood. The Lenin statue in front of the building has its own genealogy. Erected in 1987 on the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, it was created in the studio of the Soviet sculptor Nikolai Tomsky, who had produced the famous 19-metre Lenin monument in East Berlin in 1970. Tomsky's student V.S. Klimachev made the Tiraspol statue 17 years later.