Lefortovo prison

Energeticheskaya Street is a long way from Moscow’s famous tourist attractions, although the area that surrounds it is very historical. It's just few steps from Lefortovo Park, which was named after Franz Lefort, a close associate of Tsar Peter the Great, Russia’s great modernizer. Designed to please Peter the Great, it was the very first park in all Russia. Walk five minutes and you will find the house of Anna Mons, the Tsar’s famous Dutch mistress.

Despite these historical surroundings, Energeticheskaya looks like a typical suburban Moscow street, with its standard build Stalin-era houses. The prison is difficult to find, hidden behind the gloomy and ugly apartment blocks. Tourist guides are no help in locating it – why would visitors to the Russian capital be interested in it? To be frank, it cannot be found even in special books devoted to the history of Moscow.

While all of Moscow’s main prisons are described by historians or experts, - even including the internal jail in the FSB’s Lubyanka this is not the case with Lefortovo. Even the design of the prison is a mystery: nobody knows exactly why architect Kozlov in 1881 chose to design this military prison in the form of the letter “K” – with the four houseblocks connected in the center. Some speculated it might be in the honor of Catherine II the Great (Ekaterina or Katerina, in Russian), Empress of Russia. Somehow, the prison always had close ties with the regime. It soon came to be used as a favorite jail for the regime’s political enemies: by Soviet rulers as well as their successors.

Lefortovo enjoyed the special status of being the main prison of Stalin's secret services and had some peculiar detention methods. In the early 1930s Checkists believed that the prison was able to re-educate, and they even arranged boat-trips on the Moscow River for Lefortovo’s inmates. But such ideas were soon abandoned.

Writer Yevgenia Ginsburg, who was kept at Lefortovo during Stalin's Great Terror in the late 1930s, wrote in her book "Steep Route" that loud tractor engines were often kept running in the prison’s courtyard to deaden the screams of prisoners being shot in the basement.

Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his groundbreaking work "Gulag Archipelago", wrote that in the 1940s there were "psychological" cells at Lefortovo, painted all black inside and with an electric light that was never turned off. Inmates were also tortured with the roar from a wind tunnel built at the nearby Central Air and Hydrodynamics Institute.

The treatment of inmates at Lefortovo was so extreme that it was not uncommon for them to look forward to their trial, and even their Gulag sentence.

The decline of this system started only in 1959, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced his decision to reform the KGB and to reduce its ranks. Following Khrushchev's order Anatoly Shelepin, then chairman of the KGB, proposed a reduction in the number of KGB prisons. In his letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party he admitted: “At this moment we have 72 prisons, where 1388 inmates were imprisoned”. In June 1959 the special prisons department within the KGB was disbanded. In 1960 the internal prison in the Lubyanka was closed and Sukhanovo was turned into a militia school.

But the Committee of State Security managed to retain Lefortovo, the most crucial prison in its possession. During Soviet times it became the only unbroken part of the KGB as the secret service added a new block to the old tsarist fortress to house the headquarters of its investigative department. There are few more suitable options than to interrogate arrested suspects directly in prison, but it was possibly even more suitable for dealing with people not yet arrested. Those invited for interrogation to Lefortovo never knew whether they would be freed or just moved to another part of the same building – to the prison. Psychologically, it proved to be an effective method of persuasion.

Thus Lefortovo prison was retained and used by the KGB for the detention of political enemies of the regime and those suspected of espionage. As the main KGB successor in early 90s, the FSB was given Lefortovo as a part of its legacy.

Since then the FSB has used the jail for the detention of its most important inmates: spies, oligarchs and political enemies. Yeltsin's opponents, whose attempted coup in October 1993 saw the Parliament building being shelled by tanks, were sent to Lefortovo. Later the prison hosted the National Bolshevik leader and famous writer Eduard Limonov, who was accused of attempting a revolution; diplomat Valentin Moiseyev, suspected of spying for South Korea; metals magnate Anatoly Bykov, accused of ordering the murder of a former business partner; as well as Alexander Litvinenko, the FSB officer who later fled to Britain only to be mysteriously poisoned in 2006; Platon Lebedev and Alexei Pichugin, senior YUKOS managers and partners of the oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who fell foul of the Kremlin by seeking to influence politics; and the scientist Igor Sutyagin who was convicted of spying for the United States.

Eduard Limonov gave the most detailed account of the prison in his book "A Captive of Dead Men” written while he was there: “in a place where three parts of the letter K … all converge, there is a command and control room... There are always five, six, ten jailers, there are screens of computers, and there are microphones… We sit on two, on three in stone bags-cases, and the neighbors are changed in few months”. Former inmates say the guards took great pains to prevent inmates even from seeing other prisoners. While escorting them to interrogations or as they were moved from one cell to another, the guards used tiny clackers – a circular piece of metal - or just clicking their fingers - to inform other guards of their movement. The other way they communicate is by knocking on hollow pipes – which are attached to the walls at each door and along corridors. If two escorts were about to meet, one would put the inmate he was guarding into one of many black wooden cabinets that stand along the prison passages. It had been the practice since Tsarist times. In the nineteenth century there were special boxes for praying in the prison’s church that were designed to prevent Lefortovo inmates seeing each other even during a church service. Under the Soviets the church was turned into an execution chamber.

However, this strange method of warning colleagues proved, on occasion, to be dangerous for security guards. While high-ranking official Dmitry Usenko was accused of corruption and jailed in Lefortovo in November 2006, he was summoned for interrogation. He was duly accompanied by a security guard who preferred to use his own fingers for clicking instead of that circular piece of metal. The accused official was astonished to see his guard suddenly fall to his knees – he had fainted after dislocating a finger. The high ranking inmate stood helplessly over the security guard. He had no idea what to do, after all, the corridors were empty because the personnel had been warned by the guard’s clicking. He had to wait patiently for his guard to regain consciousness.

By Limonov’s estimates, there are 15 exercise yards on the prison roof in which a few prisoners can aimlessly walk, and three changes of convicts passed daily through them. Those walks begin at 8 am and convicts are moved in two lifts. There are 50 cells on each floor of the four-storey prison, but only two floors are manned. Although the prison has a capacity of up to 200, it usually contains no more than 50 detainees.

Most cells are designed to house three people but rarely are there more than two. There are also a few solitary cells and two cells for six inmates. This is a striking difference with other Moscow prisons where inmates were usually crammed into cells. Even lawyers note that it is practically the only corrective establishment in the country where drugs cannot be found and where there is a rope telegraph – it’s a Russian prison’s tradition to use a crude ''mail rope'' for transmitting notes and small packets of tea and tobacco from cell to cell. But it is likely that Lefortovo's prisoners would rather swap their apparently higher status to be in a regular jail.

Natalia Denisova is the wife of Valentin Moiseyev, a diplomat condemned for espionage, and she talks from personal experience:i “Though conditions in Lefortovo at first sight were not bad, the rules are very strict. For example, I was not allowed to see my husband for ten months, even though under the law two meetings of at least three hours a month are allowed. But I was never allowed to talk to my husband for more than an hour. It is really hard to transfer anything to prisoners, especially money. Relatives are supposed to send it by mail, and it takes a month. Money is necessary to buy products in prison”.

There was only one short period in modern Russian history when Lefortovo’s authorities changed. In 1993 the FSB temporarily lost its investigative apparatus. As a consequence, in early 1994 Lefortovo was handed over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). For the first time journalists were allowed to visit the prison, but it did not last. It was not long before two inmates, regular criminals, managed to escape from the prison. It was the first time in Lefortovo’s history. The humiliated FSB was keen to raise the question of Lefortovo and in 1997 the prison was taken away from the MVD and returned to its former owner. Along with Lefortovo 13 regional prisons were given back to the FSB.

In 2004 Vyacheslav Ushakov, the deputy director of the FSB, explained at a meeting with representatives of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly that it is absolutely crucial for the FSB to possess a prison guaranteeing “a high level of safety”. And only Lefortovo met these requirements. However, the trouble was that in March that year Ushakov's argument was queried by a young prisoner from Kyrgyzstan, who had easily made it past Lefortovo’s perimeter fence. Finally, in July 2005 Vladimir Putin signed a decreei promising that all FSB prisons, including Lefortovo, would be transferred to the Ministry of Justice by January 2006. Later, Justice Minister Yury Chaika announced at a meeting with the Council of Europe's commissioner on human rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles, that his ministry would take over Lefortovo and other penal facilities that have remained with the FSB.

Agentura.Ru, December 2010