The interiors of the remand prison No. 2 in Moscow are familiar to literally everyone - after all, it was here that the cellars of the Gestapo were filmed for the famous television series "Seventeen Moments of Spring". This is the most famous and most mysterious prison in Russia. It is located near the Butyrskaya Zastava and is listed in the list of state-protected monuments of history and architecture.
What secrets are kept in the oldest prison in Moscow? And is it possible to escape from Butyrka through a mysterious underground passage, which, according to rumors, has existed since the time of Catherine II?
Dwelling on the outskirts
The place where the prison is located has been known since 1623 as the village of Butyrkino near Moscow. The name came from the Volga, where the word "butyrki" meant "a dwelling on the outskirts". Under Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, the Butyrka regiment was formed here from among the Moscow archers, and the village was named Butyrka soldier's settlement.
During the reign of Catherine II, the barracks of the Butyrsky hussar regiment with a prison, which was a fortification, was built on this site, and at the end of February 1771 the prison building was converted into a prison.
The first "eminent" inmate of "Butyrka" was Emelyan Pugachev, delivered here in January 1775, who was kept in the basement of the South (now Pugachevskaya) tower until the day of execution.
In the 1780s and 1790s, under the leadership of the architect Mikhail Kazakov (among his works - the Senate Palace in the Kremlin and the Petrovsky Travel Palace), the main prison building was rebuilt. Today, the prison castle is a slightly elongated hexagon with four round towers at the corners - Pugachevskaya (until 1775 - South), Police, Northern and Sentinel - connected by high brick walls.
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There were many famous people among the prisoners: N. Bauman, K. Voroshilov, V. Mayakovsky, F. Dzerzhinsky, N. Makhno, S. Korolev, A. Solzhenitsyn, and even the rock singer Zh. Aguzarova, when in 1984 she was found with a passport in a false name, although the singer was quickly released.
According to legend, not confirmed due to the loss of official documents, for several days young Joseph Dzhugashvili, who still had the revolutionary nickname Koba, was in Butyrka.
The prison is currently used as the largest pre-trial detention center in Moscow. This is a complex of 20 buildings. There are 434 cells in the prison, of which 101 are common, measuring 6 by 12 meters. Judging by the clothes hooks on the walls, initially it was supposed to accommodate 20-25 prisoners in them (in the 30s of the XX century in each such cell there were up to a hundred people who slept in 3-4 shifts).
Another 301 cells have a smaller area - they must contain four people. There are 32 punishment cells for the guilty.
In total, Butyrskaya prison is designed to hold 3,500 prisoners.
Unfinished novel
There is an opinion among the prisoners that the very place for the prison was not chosen well. Butyrskaya Sloboda was initially notorious. Muscovites believed that this land was marked by a curse. Both peasants from neighboring villages and cabbies, who refused to take their riders here, tried to avoid the lost place.
It was believed that the Butyrskaya Sloboda had a detrimental effect on the human mind - and even a short stay here could lose it.
The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was transferred to the Butyrka prison after a conflict with the authorities of the closed design bureau in Marfin (the so-called Marfinskaya "sharashka") and stayed here from May to August 1950. According to the memoirs of his wife, in prison, Alexander Isaevich began to write a novel, which he later destroyed.
According to his wife, Solzhenitsyn complained that, despite all his efforts, the narrative turns out to be completely incomprehensible to the reader and that it is simply impossible to write and even speak in Butyrka in normal human language - this prison literally drives you crazy. According to him, many of the local prisoners constantly heard strange groans and screams at night, felt someone's heavy breathing in the silence and turned to echoing footsteps behind their backs.
“If such a novel were published, the author would simply be declared insane,” the wife of the writer's decision explained.
Underground passages and secret chambers
According to legend, there are mysterious underground passages in Butyrka. One of the passages was so large that it was possible to drive a carriage along it. It was along it that Catherine II went to the dungeon to look at Pugachev. The old plans of the building have not survived - so no one still knows whether this is true or not.
According to another legend, an underground passage connects the Butyrka prison with the Kremlin - it was dug during the Stalinist terror, and according to it, the "leader of all times and peoples" sometimes came by car to watch the interrogations and executions of his former comrades-in-arms. No other prison in the USSR had such a large number of executions. It is said that at that time the floors in the corridors were slippery with the blood that the firing squads carried with their boots.
In the premises of the Pugachevskaya tower, where sentences were carried out, strange events still take place. Here mysterious lights flash and disappear, and at night, according to eyewitnesses, ghosts wander.
One of them is a strange woman in white. It is believed that this is the ghost of the unfortunate woman who was immured alive in one of the cells during the time of Catherine II. The ghost scares prisoners and guards, reflected in the window panes. People say that guard dogs become numb with horror and whine, tails between their legs, when they meet him.
The prisoners are sure that in modern Russia some of the criminals sentenced to death were not shot, and they are still being held in secret cells of Butyrka, for example, serial maniac Andrei Chikatilo. Experienced convicts claim that there was no execution: Chikatilo turned out to be too interesting for psychiatrists.
Now he supposedly sits somewhere in a secret cell and still tells doctors about his crimes. And sometimes his screams mystically spread throughout the prison and drive those who are weaker to insanity.
Mikhalych and Golovkin
There are persistent rumors among the prisoners that during the years of the Stalinist terror some mysterious experiments related to organ transplantation were carried out here in Butyrka prison. Some of the victims have not yet found rest - and wander the prison corridors at night. One of the ghosts, nicknamed Mikhalych, faced with guards and convicts, demands his liver back. By the way, here they really believe in these stories.
There is a known case when a prisoner named Sergei met with Mikhalych, suspected of a series of robberies - and rather skeptical about the existence of the ghosts of the prison. He was returning to the cell after a meeting with his wife - and suddenly an old convict in rags splattered with blood appeared in the corridor in front of him and the escort. The old man asked Sergei for a liver, then just as suddenly disappeared.
Sergei came to the cell and told what had happened. Experienced convicts explained: now death awaits him, those who saw Mikhalych do not live long. A few days later, Sergei dramatically changed his character, stopped talking with his cellmates - and soon opened his veins.
Some prisoners say that in the corridors they were attacked by a ghost, who grabbed them by the shoulders, threatened with reprisals and even stabbed them with a knife, and the guards did not see him and did not react to him in any way.
This or a similar ghost can sometimes reach out from the prison wall and strangle a sleeping prisoner. His cold hands bruise his neck from the touch.
Many believe that this is the ghost of Sergei Golovkin, a pedophile serial killer named Fisher, who was executed in Butyrskaya prison in August 1996. He did not live to see a moratorium on the death penalty for just a few weeks and is officially considered the last suicide bomber in Russia.
There is a version that, contrary to the strict ban, the prison officers, in order to intensify the torture of the pedophile, informed him in advance of the date and time of the execution. By the time of his execution, Golovkin was in a state close to insanity, and even now his soul cannot rest.
A prison that won't let go
Another legend of the Butyrka prison says: everyone who escapes from here will definitely return to its walls. There is at least one exception to this rule, though.
According to rumors, the first person who managed to escape from the Butyrka was Felix Dzerzhinsky. Allegedly, the future head of the Cheka managed to escape into the wild in a barrel of garbage. True, it is impossible to confirm this fact - according to the documents, Dzerzhinsky was officially released after the February Revolution.
During Soviet times, no prison escapes were reported and no data have survived.
After the collapse of the USSR, there have been about a dozen unsuccessful escapes from Butyrka - including the one when in 2001 three especially dangerous criminals dug out the cement floor with spoons and got out into the street through the sewer. Two were arrested three weeks later, the third in April 2003.
The only successful escape can be called the daring "breakthrough" of 26-year-old Vitaly Ostrovsky in 2010. The prisoner was previously the champion of Belarus in parkour. He pushed the guard away and jumped over a high barbed-wire lattice. It has not been possible to catch Ostrovsky so far.
According to the management of the Butyrka prison, from time to time there are people who want to buy out a complex of historical buildings for conversion into an exotic hotel. But when investors calculate the cost of the project, they refuse the deal. So the story of Butyrka is still not over.
Nikolay MIKHAILOV