The Great Terror

The Lubyanka was free of bugs, and the same is reported of some of the Kiev prisons, though bugs usually abounded. (In spite of the far cleaner and more sanitary conditions in the German concentration camps compared with the Soviet labor camps, the same does not seem to have been true of the prisons. The Berlin Central Prison on the Alexanderplatz is described as being more lice-ridden than prisons in Moscow.)¹⁰³

The corridors of the Lubyanka were clean, smelling of carbolic and disinfectant. It is the best known of the NKVD prisons, since it lies within the headquarters of the Police Ministry, and has been the scene of the most famous imprisonments, interrogations, and executions. But though its great wedge looming over Dzerzhinsky Square is only a few minutes’ walk from the Kremlin and the general tourist area, it is seldom pointed out to visitors even now.

It was originally the headquarters of an insurance company. The Cheka took over the old building, and over the years built over the entire block. The original building is pre-Revolutionary Gothic; the rest of the block was rebuilt in two bursts: one in 1930-functional, and the other in postwar wedding-cake style. The People’s Commissariat consisted of the whole outer section. Inside is a courtyard, and within the courtyard is the nine-story prison section. This was originally a hotel or boarding house run by the insurance company, and though considerably adapted has not been rebuilt. As a result, the rooms used as cells are less unpleasant than the cells in the other prisons. The windows—though largely blocked by shutters—are of good size.

The Lubyanka had about 110 cells, which were fairly small. It seems improbable that more than a few hundred prisoners were held there at a time.

Prisoners who were unsatisfactory in the preliminary interrogations at the Lubyanka were often transferred to the 160-cell Lefortovo—in particular, the military. No clear account of the atrocities practiced in the Lefortovo is available. We are told that prisoners who had been there and were transferred to the Butyrka regarded the beating up in the latter prison as child’s play compared with their previous sufferings.¹⁰⁴ The Lefortovo was built just before the First World War in a more or less star shape, with blocks radiating from the center. It had the advantage that there were water closets actually in the cells.

The Butyrka, started in the eighteenth century to house the captured rebels of the Pugachev insurrection, is by far the largest prison. It consists of a number of vast barrack-like blocks, centered on the old section, “the Pugachev Tower,” in which the great rebel had been held before his execution. In the Purge, it held about 30,000 prisoners.¹⁰⁵

Gorbatov, who was tortured in the Lefortovo, says that the Butyrka was an immense improvement. Prisoners got half an hour’s exercise a day instead of ten minutes every other day. It had large exercise yards, unlike the cramped squares of the Lefortovo.¹⁰⁶ Exercise was taken, walking in pairs, with hands behind backs and eyes to the ground. Any swinging of arms or raising of heads was immediately stopped.¹⁰⁷

Women with newborn babies are reported in the Butyrka.¹⁰⁸ On the other hand, others were brought in who had had to leave children, and nursing babies, unattended at home. They had their breasts bandaged to stop the milk.¹⁰⁹

The Taganka, and other prisons holding politicals and others, were like the Butyrka, but dirtier and less efficient.¹¹⁰

A special small prison some ten or twenty miles out of Moscow, the Sukhanovka, deserves mention. It had a particularly fearful reputation among prisoners, who knew it as “the dacha.”¹¹¹ It was a single-story building, consisting of a set of isolators; and torture was the normal method of procedure. It is said to have been built specially for the Rudzutak–Postyshev intake. It was the one place were the regulations were observed so strictly that the warders literally never spoke at all to the prisoners.

In Leningrad, there was a similar system. The Shpalerny

prison, described as comparatively clean and orderly, fulfilled the role of the Lubyanka in Moscow with about 300 cells. The larger Nizhnegorodsky, too, had a number of one-man cells for important prisoners. The Kresti, equivalent to the Butyrka, with about 30,000 prisoners,¹¹² was more squalid altogether, with sixteen men sharing what had been a one-man cell in Tsarist times.¹¹³ A special Transfer Prison held those already sentenced to camps. (And outside, tourists were being shown as a horror of the past the cells of the old Peter Paul Fortress, where a handful of politicals had been held in considerably better circumstances before the Revolution.)