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Butyrka prison
	The prison in 2010
Location	Sokolniki District, Moscow, Russia
Coordinates	55°47′04″N 37°35′38″E / 55.78444°N 37.59389°E
Opened	1771
Managed by	Federal Penitentiary Service

Butyrskaya prison (Russian: Бутырская тюрьма, romanized: Butýrskaya tyurmá), usually known simply as Butyrka (Russian: Бутырка, IPA: [bʊˈtɨrkə]), is a prison in the Tverskoy District of central Moscow, Russia. In Imperial Russia it served as the central transit prison.

During the Soviet Union era (1917–1991) it held many political prisoners. As of 2022^[update] Butyrka remains the largest of Moscow's remand prisons. Overcrowding is an ongoing problem.

History

The first references to Butyrka prison may be traced back to the 17th century. The current 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.^[1] The towers of the old fortress once housed the rebellious Streltsy during the reign of Peter I,^[2] 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 anytime the inmates tried to protest.

Its famous inmates include the influential revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian revolutionary Nikolay Bauman, and the founder of the KGB Felix Dzerzhinsky. During the February Revolution, the workers of Moscow freed all the political prisoners from the Butyrka. Following 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 twenty thousand inmates at a time were imprisoned in Butyrka. Thousands of political prisoners were shot after investigations. Later, prominent political prisoners included the writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgenia Ginzburg.

Living conditions

Varlam Shalamov notes in one of his tales, that the Butyrka is extremely hot in summer; Eduard Limonov, in his drama Death in the Police Van, emphatically agrees. He says that, with the collapse of the Soviet regime, overcrowding has become a real issue; there are more than one hundred inmates in cells meant to contain ten people. In a 2019 interview the warden of the prison said "The limit of our detention facility is 1,847 inmates. In fact, now when we are talking there are 2,292 people here."^[3] Most of these people are politically unreliable subjects from the Caucasus. Since epidemics are a problem, the wardens try to fill cells entirely with people with AIDS, or with tuberculosis; however, this does little to curb the problem, since many inmates are drug users, and there is at most one needle per cell. Moreover, inmates are brought to the tribunal in overcrowded police vans, so that healthy inmates are exposed to tuberculosis.

Notable inmates

Fabijan Abrantovich, Catholic priest and a pro-independence activist from Belarus
Anna Abrikosova, nun of the Dominican Order and prominent figure in the Catholic Church in Russia
Andrei Amalrik, Russian historian and famed dissident during the 1960s; author of "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984"
Władysław Anders, Polish general and prime minister
Valery Asratyan, serial killer, serial rapist and child molester executed in 1996
Isaak Babel, writer, killed in 1940
Aron Baron, Ukrainian anarchist
Mieczysław Boruta-Spiechowicz, Polish general and one of the leaders of anti-communist opposition in the 1970s
Alikhan Bukeikhanov, Kazakh statesman
Walerian Czuma, Polish general
Felix Dzerzhinsky, Cheka founder
Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, Russian statesman
Yuli-Yoel Edelstein (Hebrew: יולי-יואל אדלשטיין, Russian: Ю́лий Ю́рьевич Эдельште́йн is an Israeli politician. One of the most prominent refuseniks in the Soviet Union, he has been Speaker of the Knesset since 2013
Blessed Leonid Feodorov, Exarch and reputed bishop of the Russian Greek Catholic Church
Rashid Khan Gaplanov, Education and Finance Minister of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic^[4]
Yevgenia Ginzburg, author of Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind; mother of the writer Vasili Aksyonov; her books tell of her arrest during the 1937 purges in the city of Kazan, where she worked as a leading member of the local Communist Party structures of Tartary
Filipp Goloshchyokin, Soviet politician and party leader, was briefly held in Butyrka and sent to Kuibyshev and shot there in October 1941
Sergey Golovkin, serial killer and the last person to be executed in Russia
Sergey Gordeyev, mass murderer who took 29 students hostage at his school
Dmitry Pavlovich Grigorovich, aircraft designer
Vladimir Gusinsky, led to the "shares for freedom" transaction or Protocol No.6 (Протокол N.6. Доля свободы) that was signed by Minister for Press, Broadcasting and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Lesin
Werner Haase, one of Adolf Hitler's personal physicians, died in captivity in 1950
Heinz Hitler, German dictator Adolf Hitler's favorite nephew, died after several days of torture in 1942
Vladimir Ionesyan, spree killer executed in 1964
Vyacheslav Ivankov, mob boss and thief in law
Aleksandr Ivanov-Sukharevsky, Neo-Nazi and former politician
Bruno Jasieński, Polish poet and futurist, killed in 1938
Elena Karpuchina, the 1967 World Rhythmic Gymnastics Champion, born in 1951 and spent her first two years living in Butyrki until her mother's pardon in 1953
Aleksandr Kokorin, Russian footballer
Sergei Korolev, Russian rocket and spacecraft designer
Walter Linse, German human rights lawyer kidnapped in the American sector of Berlin in July 1952, executed 15 December 1953
Alexander Litvinenko
Blessed Zygmunt Łoziński, Catholic bishop of Minsk
Sergei Magnitsky, lawyer, whose 2009 death in Matrosskaya Tishina Prison led to a 2009 Russian law forbidding jailing of tax criminals and also to the Magnitsky Act being passed by the US Congress in 2012.
Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian anarchist
Pavel Mamayev, Russian footballer
Vladimir Mayakovsky, poet
Günther Merk, SS-Brigadeführer and war criminal, executed in January 1947
Leopold Okulicki, Polish general, last commander of the Armia Krajowa, killed in Butyrki in 1946
Konstantin Päts, president of the Republic of Estonia when it became occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940
Unto Parvilahti, SS-Officer
Nikolai Polikarpov, Soviet aeronautical engineer
Yevgeny Polivanov, Soviet linguist, orientalist and polyglot who was executed in 1938^[5]
Yemelyan Pugachev, pretender to the Russian throne and leader of a Cossack insurrection in 1773–1774
Sergei Ryakhovsky, serial killer
Varlam Shalamov, writer and soviet dissident; wrote The Kolyma Tales
Kazys Skučas, Lithuanian politician and general of the Lithuanian Army
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize laureate, writer and dissident; wrote The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Elena Stasova, Russian communist
Karlo Štajner, Yugoslav communist activist and writer
Baruch Steinberg, Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army
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; 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
Avgustyn Voloshyn, former president of Carpatho-Ukraine, died in Butyrka in 1945
Helmuth Weidling, German Wehrmacht general and last commandant of Berlin, died in custody in 1955
Jonas Žemaitis, Lithuanian general, head of the Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisan forces after World War II, shot to death in 1953;^[6] later recognized as the fourth President of Lithuania in 2009
Abba Gordin, anarchist