JUSTICE : Russian Prison Has Lock on History

This city, woozy with its bygone glory, bursts with splendid palaces, wondrous art, impressively noble monuments. And then there’s the basement museum at Kresty prison. No gold or glitter there. Just a raw, unflinching reflection of recent Russian history.

The one-room museum was founded three years ago with a humble goal: to commemorate the centennial of one of Russia’s most notorious prisons. But as the volunteer curators found, tracing the history of Kresty’s dank cells requires delving into decades of repression.

Rummaging through archives, curators pulled out accounts of political prisoners dumped in Kresty from czarist times through the Communist years. They found photos of the artists, lawyers, engineers, dissidents and ordinary citizens deemed “enemies of the people” in one purge or another and locked up on the banks of the Neva River.

Thus they created a haunting museum.

In sharp counterpoint to St. Petersburg’s jeweled ballrooms and marble cathedrals, the Kresty museum focuses not on grandeur but on terror. It catalogs not the wealth of the elite but the fatal excesses of the powerful.

“It’s our history, and we can’t ever escape from it,” said curator Lyudmila I. Karneyeva, who worked for 29 years as a prison librarian before teaming with a colleague to create the museum.

Kresty officials gave them the basement room, and the pair did the rest--volunteering after hours to assemble the collection and putting up their own money to organize the exhibits.

Now, for the first time, Russians and foreign tourists may get that chance.

After denying the public admission to the museum for the past three years, citing security concerns, Kresty Director Stepan V. Demchuk recently agreed to open the doors to visitors who apply in advance.

“I won’t oppose people coming here,” Demchuk said. “If we don’t remember the past, we won’t have a future.”

Disquieting reminders of that past pop up in odd corners of the Kresty museum.

Take, for example, the mundane descriptions of prison beds. Simply by cataloging the sleeping conditions of Kresty inmates, the curators documented the alternating waves of repression and reform that have rippled through Russia over the past century.

Early Kresty prisoners--including the future Communist leader Leon Trotsky--could stretch out in relatively spacious cells of 80 square feet. Czar Nicholas II prided himself on running “the biggest and most comfortable jail in all of Europe,” museum co-founder Alla Z. Kaufman explained.

Each inmate had a bed, a desk and plenty of room to pace.

But when the Communists took power in 1917, they quickly put an end to such bourgeois luxury.

Josef Stalin packed Kresty with so many political opponents that prison officials had to rip out the czarist-era cots and install two levels of planks across the width of each cell. The inmates slept side by side on the makeshift beds, jammed ever closer as fresh prisoners joined their ranks.

The prison was cleared out in World War II, when Russia drafted every capable man to fight Nazi Germany. And sure enough, the wartime reprieve from Stalin’s ferocity showed up in Kresty’s sleeping arrangements: Prison guards knocked down the planks and brought in more comfortable bunk beds.

Yet with victory, the purges soon returned. Political prisoners once again filled Kresty. Administrators had to add a third tier of beds and cram six prisoners into each cell.

In the current chaos of post-Soviet Russia, even that arrangement has proved inadequate. The political terror has lifted. But the crime rate has soared. Kresty, designed for no more than 3,000 inmates, now houses at least 11,000.

Each cell holds 10 or 12 prisoners. They sleep in shifts. They live on porridge, brown bread and the occasional slab of meat. They shower once every 10 days. And they must bring their own clothes and blankets to their meager cells. Kresty can no longer afford to keep inmates warm.

As the museum guides pointedly recall, enlightened rulers have long considered such conditions inhumane.

In the 1820s, Czar Nicholas I proclaimed: “A nation cannot consider itself civilized if its prisons are in an awful state.”

But Demchuk, like Kresty administrators before him, is in no position to refuse the inmates the government keeps sending his way.

“There is so much lawlessness and hooliganism, and that has brought us to this state,” he said wearily.

Today’s Kresty no longer serves as a dumping ground for dissidents. The enormous red-brick complex--named for the Russian word for “crosses” since it was built in the shape of twin crosses--has been transformed into a pretrial detention center.

Still, as the museum makes clear, the routine inside Kresty has changed little over the century.

Even now, inmates stifle in foul-smelling cells for years. The Russian courts move so slowly that suspects routinely wait in detention centers such as Kresty for three or four years before their trials begin.

To prevent them from conferring with witnesses, Kresty inmates are barred from communicating with friends or relatives: no visits, no letters, no phone calls.

The hapless political prisoners featured in the museum’s photo gallery would certainly empathize.

Scientist Lev Gumilev, for example, spent three lonely stretches in Kresty.

He was imprisoned in 1935 for a typical Stalinist crime--being related to his father, who had been shot for subversive writings more than a decade earlier. Gumilev was tossed in jail again in 1940--this time for being related to his mother, the poet Anna Akhmatova. In 1949, he returned to a Kresty cell, denounced as an enemy of the people in his own right.

Frantic for information about her son, Akhmatova held vigils on Kresty’s doorstep every day for 17 months during his second imprisonment.

Only too aware of the prison’s chokehold on innocent and guilty alike, the museum curators make a point of emphasizing the horrors of life in Kresty--not only in the gloomy past but in the uncertain present.

Just possibly, they said, visitors may be scared into law-abiding rectitude.

Simon was recently on assignment in St. Petersburg.