House No. 12 is located at the end of Kropotkinsky Lane and is the oldest building in this lane. Its mention can be found on the plan from 1760, where the stone chambers of Colonel I.I. Rzhevsky are indicated on a narrow and long plot that also leads to the neighboring Troitsky Lane. Opposite, a beautiful fence of the Trinity Church in Zubovo has been preserved.

In the early 19th century, the house belonged to Anton Ivanovich Gerhard, an engineer and builder of the Moskva River embankments and bridges; the family of his son lived here. In the second half of the 19th century, Decembrist Alexander Petrovich Belyaev lived and died here on December 28, 1887. His name has remained in the history of several Moscow houses, as during the Soviet era, the names of Decembrists served as a kind of "protection" for old mansions, and this house was no exception.

Alexander Belyaev (1802, 1887) was a midshipman of the Guard crew and a participant in the uprising on Senate Square. In 1824, he became one of the founders of the secret "Society of Officers of the Guard Crew" and the author of its "charters." In 1825, he was accepted into the "Order of Restoration" by Dmitry Zavalishin. Belyaev wrote interesting and detailed "Memoirs of Experiences and Feelings," which he published in the magazine "Russian Antiquity" in 1880 and subsequent years, having already gone completely blind. In 1872, he was visited by Leo Tolstoy, who intended to write a novel about the Decembrists, and Belyaev handed him the manuscript of his memoirs.

According to Moscow historian Sergey Romanyuk, Belyaev's apartment overlooked the parallel Shatny (the name of Kropotkinsky Lane) Troitsky Lane, which was renamed Pomerantsev in 1922 in honor of ensign Pomerantsev, a participant in the battles of November 1917.

Alexander Belyaev is buried at Vagankovo Cemetery. By the end of the 1940s, his grave was lost, but the exact location was established from photographs by local historian A.T. Lebedev. The gravestone indicates the incorrect date of death: 1885. After him, only Zavalishin and Svistunov remained alive among the long-lived Decembrists.

Almost opposite the house is the Derzhinskaya mansion, a masterpiece of the Art Nouveau era, created by architect Fyodor Shekhtel. Previously, the windows of the mansion overlooked the large garden of the Gerhard house, from which, unfortunately, nothing remains.

In the 1920s, the house housed the representation of the Bukhara Socialist Soviet Republic.

Currently, the building houses the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt in the Russian Federation. The house is a cultural heritage site of federal significance.