Window on Eurasia

For Want of Investors, Russia’s Largest Prison Will Remain Just That

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 26, 2006 – Officials in St. Petersburg would like to close the notorious Kresty Prison but only if they can find a private investor willing to build a new detention facility on the outskirts of Russia’s northern capital in exchange for ownership of the current penitentiary’s prime location on the Arsenal Embankment.

Up to now, however, the city has found no takers willing to spend the
estimated 300 million U.S. dollars needed to build the new facility,
and as a result, the Kresty continues as Russia’s – and Europe’s
largest – detention facility, albeit with a couple of new twists
[http://www.annews.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=50939].

The Kresty Prison, built in the nineteenth century, has been the
temporary place of residence for a wide variety of people, ranging from
all the members of the first Russian Duma, Aleksandr Kerenskiy who
headed the Provisional Government in 1917, Soviet Marshal Konstantin
Rokossovkiy, and Eurasianist Lev Gumilyev.

But it is perhaps most well-known as the prison Anna Akhmatova wrote
about standing outside of in the 1930s in her poem, “Requiem.”
There is a tablet in honor of her and that poem near the prison, but plans to
erect a monument to perhaps Russia's greatest 20th century poet at
that site have not been fulfilled, ANN news reported yesterday.

When the prison was erected in the 1870s, it conformed to the most
modern standards of American penology, Russian officials say. But
Russian, Soviet and then Russian officials have failed to make the
necessary investment in it, and Kresty now has inadequate electric,
plumbing and heating facilities.

Thousands of prisoners have passed through its cells. As recently as
2002, there were 12,500 inmates. But that number has now fallen to
3500, a number still larger than the prison was designed to accommodate and
one that Russian jailors lack the funds to support adequately.

As a result, officials have come up with creative ways to raise money.
They charge prisoners who want to have their own mobile phones and now
organize special tours of the notorious site. Visitors – most of
whom, ANN says, are former inmates, their relatives, or journalists -- pay 50
rubles (about four dollars U.S.) for the privilege.

Those who do go on these tours, the jailor-guides say, are shown the
entire facility, and one prison cell is always kept vacant so that
tourists can feel at least for a few minutes what many of the inmates
there have experienced over the course of months or years.

But because of Kresty’s age and decay, city officials have long
wanted to build a new prison and turn over this property to someone for other
kinds of development. In the 1970s, the city’s Communist Party boss
Grigoriy Romanov actively considered doing just that. Unfortunately,
neither then nor later did the government have the funds to do so.

Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the rise
of capitalism, Russian officials hope that some private investor will
solve the problem. They propose that someone who would like to develop
the Kresty property, possibly turning it into condominium apartments,
should build a new prison on the outskirts of the city.

The new facility, officials say, would need to have room for 5,000
inmates and could cost anywhere from 250 to 300 million euros. So far,
that price tag has scared off all potential investors. And as a result,
the Kresty prison with its gloomy façade and uncomfortable interior
still functions where and how it has for more than a century.

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