Alexander Griboyedov was Russia's most celebrated comic dramatist, author of Woe from Wit, and -- by 1828 -- Russia's envoy to Persia. His diplomatic mission followed the Treaty of Turkmenchay, which had ended the Russo-Persian War on humiliating terms for Iran. Griboyedov learned that Georgian and Armenian women were being held in the household of a prominent Iranian nobleman and, invoking the treaty, demanded their extradition. The demand was legal. It was also deeply provocative. On February 11, 1829, popular fury boiled over. A mob attacked the embassy and killed most of the diplomatic staff, including Griboyedov himself. His body was transported to Tbilisi for burial. The aftermath required delicate diplomacy: Fath-Ali Shah Qajar sent his grandson to Saint Petersburg with an apology and a gift calculated to prevent war -- the 88.7-carat Shah Diamond, which remains in the Kremlin Diamond Fund to this day.

Eighty years later, the embassy became a sanctuary for a different kind of crisis. Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar had spent his reign trying to dismantle Iran's fledgling constitutional government. In July 1909, constitutionalist forces marched on Tehran in what became known as the Triumph of Tehran, seizing the capital and overthrowing him. The deposed shah fled to the one place in the city where Iranian forces would not follow: the Russian embassy. He sheltered there briefly before being forced into permanent exile in Russia itself. The irony was pointed -- a Persian king taking refuge with the power that had humiliated his country only decades before, protected by the same diplomatic immunity that Griboyedov had invoked to fatal consequence.

The embassy's current location dates to September 1915, when Russia rented Atabek Park from a Russian-owned bank operating in Iran. The rent was modest: 1,650 manats through March 1916, then 6,000 manats per year. Two years later, the Russian Revolution of 1917 threw the arrangement into chaos. The bank lost its government tenant; ownership questions multiplied. Under the 1921 Russo-Persian Friendship Treaty, the property was to revert to Iranian ownership. The Soviet foreign ministry requested the embassy be relocated to Atabek Park, and Iran agreed. But neither side formally registered the property. Moscow considered it Iranian land and offered to provide a building for Iran's embassy in exchange -- a proposal Tehran never answered. The architectural design of the main building is attributed to Mirza Mehdi Khan Shaghaghi, recognized as one of Iran's first modern architects.

In late November 1943, the Soviet Embassy in Tehran became the most consequential meeting room on Earth. The Tehran Conference, held from November 28 to December 1, brought together Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin for the first time as allied leaders. Roosevelt stayed at the Soviet compound rather than the American or British missions, ostensibly for security. The three men agreed on the critical decision of the war: opening a second front in Western Europe, the invasion that would become D-Day six months later. The conference also produced declarations on Iran's sovereignty and postwar cooperation. For a few days, the fate of the world was decided in a garden compound in Tehran -- the same ground where Griboyedov had died, where a shah had hidden, and where empires had collided for more than a century.