Kresty Prison Could Soon House Hotel or Gallery

By Galina Stolyarova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: July 25, 2012 (Issue # 1719)

Alexander Belenky / spt With a new detention facility being built outside of St. Petersburg, City Hall is looking into redeveloping Kresty.

As a new pre-trial detention facility in the suburb of Kolpino nears completion, the city government is exploring the possibilities of breathing new life into the infamous Kresty prison on the Arsenalnaya embankment. In the autumn, City Hall plans to announce a tender for potential investors to redevelop the territory of the prison and its surroundings.

Turning the prison into a hotel, a museum, an art gallery, a business center and even a creative cluster complete with studios of local artists are just some of the ideas that have already been voiced. City Hall’s Committee for Investment and Strategic Projects has already voiced the cluster idea to City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko, and it was received favorably, according to the committee’s representative, Irina Babyuk.

“By October 1, our committee will prepare a plan for the redevelopment of a number of dilapidated former industrial zones,” she said. “What is required at the moment is for us to be able to include Kresty — which is controlled by the federal government — on the list. This issue needs to be settled with the federal authorities.”

Although in no way a postcard view, Kresty became one of the city’s iconic images long before St. Petersburg earned the unflattering nickname of Russia’s criminal capital in the turbulent 1990s. It has housed some of the country’s most high-profile prisoners, including politicians Lev Trotsky and Alexander Kerensky and poets Nikolai Gumilev and Daniil Kharms, and has been the setting for dozens of thrillers and crime series.

Kresty opened a small museum back in 1993 that originally served for the purposes of training prison staff, but opened to the general public in 1999. The excursion covers visits to the administrative building as well as the Alexander Nevsky church and one of the cells. The exhibit features photographs of famous inmates, banned items confiscated during searches, and souvenirs made by the prisoners from bread, wood and paper.

The federal government began construction of a new facility in Kolpino several years ago after Russia adopted a program of moving 70 prisons from their locations in the center of towns.

Built in 1890 and designed by the architect Antony Tomishko, Kresty is scheduled to relocate to Kolpino in 2015.

The jail got its nickname, Kresty (Crosses) very shortly after it received its first inmates. The two four-story wings of the prison are designed in the form of a cross. According to legend, Tomishko initially designed the jail for 999 cells, but there was a 1000th cell, where the architect himself was locked up and buried after allegedly saying to the tsar, “Look what a beautiful prison I have built for you.” Although no proof has ever been found for the legend, speculation about the mythical 1000th cell still circulates. There are in fact 960 cells in the prison.

The prison has not undergone large-scale renovation since it was built.

Many of the country’s prisons are located in historical buildings, many of which were built back in tsarist times.

By the 1990s, Kresty was one of the country’s most overcrowded jails. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has been bombarded with applications from inmates complaining about dimly lit cells and blocked ventilation systems, overcrowded cells and a permanent lack of basic toiletries. Inmates were for a long time limited to less than 10 minutes per week in the shower, and were forced to huddle together to share showerheads.

In 2007, the Strasbourg court ruled that the Russian authorities must pay more than $20,000 in damages to a St. Petersburg prisoner forced to share a cell in Kresty measuring eight square meters with 12 other inmates. The prisoner, Andrei Frolov, was held in Kresty from January 1999 to February 2003.

“The fact that Frolov was obliged to live, sleep and use the toilet in the same cell as so many other inmates for more than four years was in itself sufficient to cause distress or hardship of an intensity exceeding the unavoidable level of suffering inherent in detention,” the ruling reads.

Kresty, which was and remains Europe’s largest jail, was originally designed for the prisoners to be kept in solitary conditions in order that they be able to meditate over their crimes. The prison was designed to contain a maximum of 1,150 prisoners, but in recent decades routinely held from 4,000 to 12,000 inmates. The new facility in Kolpino is designed for 4,000 inmates. The authorities have promised that conditions in the new jail will comply with European standards and will not earn Russia more appeals to the European Court of Human Rights.