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Butyrka prison (Russian: Бутырка, a colloquial term for the official Бутырская тюрьма, Butyrskaya tyurma) was the central transit prison in pre-Revolutionary Russia, located in Moscow.
The first references to Butyrka prison may be traced back to the 17th century. The present prison building was erected in 1879 near the Butyrsk gate (Бутырская застава, or Butyrskaya zastava) on the site of a prison-fortress which had been built by the architect Matvei Kazakov during the reign of Catherine the Great. The towers of the old fortress once housed the rebellious Streltsy during the reign of Peter I and later on hundreds of participants of the 1863 January Uprising in Poland. Members of Narodnaya Volya were also prisoners of the Butyrka in 1883, as were the participants in the Morozov Strike of 1885. The Butyrka prison was known for its brutal regime. The prison administration resorted to violence every time the inmates tried to protest against anything.
Among its famous inmates were the influential revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Russian revolutionary Nikolai Bauman, the founder of the KGB Felix Dzerzhinsky (who was one of the few individuals to stage a successful escape from the prison), and the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
During the February Revolution, the workers of Moscow freed all the political prisoners from the Butyrka.
After the October Revolution Butyrka remained a place of internment for political prisoners and a transfer camp for people sentenced to be sent to the Gulag.
During the Great Purge about 20 thousand inmates at a time were imprisoned in Butyrka. Thousands of political prisoners were shot after the "investigations".
Currently Butyrka remains the largest of Moscow remand prisons. Overcrowding continues to be a problem.
Famous inmates
- Fabijan Abrantovich, a well-known Catholic priest and a pro-independence activist from Belarus;
- Władysław Anders, Polish general and prime minister
- Isaak Babel, writer, killed in 1940
- Nikolai Bauman, Russian revolutionary
- Walerian Czuma, Polish general
- Felix Dzerzhinsky, Cheka founder
- Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, Russian statesman
- Heinz Hitler, German dictator Adolf Hitler's favorite nephew died after several months of torture in 1942
- Werner Haase, one of Adolf Hitler's personal physicians, died in captivity in 1950
- Bruno Jasieński, Polish poet and futurist, killed in 1938
- Stanisław Jasiukowicz, Polish minister, tortured to death in Butyrki in 1946
- Yevgenia Ginzburg, Russian writer and historian
- Sergei Korolev, Russian rocket and spacecraft designer
- Friedrich Lengnik, Russian revolutionary
- Blessed Zygmunt Łoziński, catholic bishop of Minsk
- Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian anarchist
- Vladimir Mayakovsky, poet
- Leopold Okulicki, Polish general, last commander of the Armia Krajowa, killed in Butyrki in 1946
- Yemelyan Pugachev, pretender to the Russian throne and leader of a Cossack insurrection in 1773-1774
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writer
- Mieczysław Boruta-Spiechowicz, Polish general and one of the leaders of anti-communist opposition in the 1970s
- Yelena Stasova, Russian revolutionary
- Léon Theremin, a pioneer of electronic music, the inventor of the theremin and an electronic eavesdropping bug.
- Sergei Tretyakov, Avant-Garde playwright during the 1920s. He apparently threw himself down a prison stairwell to avoid execution.
- Augustinas Voldemaras, once the prime minister of Lithuania, died in this prison after Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940
- Avhustyn Voloshyn, former president of Carpatho-Ukraine, died in Butyrka in 1945.
- Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, future leader of the Society of the Godless
- Jonas Žemaitis, Lithuanian general, head of the Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisan forces after WWII, shot to death in 1953 [1]
External links
- Official site of Butyrka prison (Russian)
- Article of the political prisoner's department of the Russian mypeople.ru
- Article of Rossiskaja Gaseta (Russian)
- A list of prisons in Moscow (Russian)
- BBC report about Butyrka prison at Johnson's Russia list
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 3 October 2008, at 09:25.
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