Butyrka Prison — From a Hussar Settlement to Moscow’s Main Detention Center

At first, the site where Butyrka Prison now stands was a village that housed a hussar regiment. Later, printing houses appeared on this city edge, and the workers there were called “butyri” (with stress on the second syllable). Eventually, criminals began calling the local police officers by the same name — that’s how “Butyrsky Central” and “Butyrsky Castle” originated.

A hundred years after its founding, Butyrka became not only a place of punishment but also a transfer prison. Inmates sentenced to long terms waited there for transportation to Siberian labor camps. Around that time, one of the first organized criminal groups formed within its walls. Its members set up an underground workshop inside the prison, producing counterfeit money that they circulated outside. The scheme involved buying small-denomination banknotes, erasing the printed values, and writing higher ones over them. The equipment for forgery was hidden in one of the cells, and the group’s contact with the outside world was maintained through a lawyer named Lazarev.

According to the recollections of the famous lawyer Fyodor Plevako, the group was international — Russians, Germans, Jews, Armenians, and Poles. As stated in the 1877 indictment, the operation was exposed thanks to one of its own members, Matusevich, who was secretly an informant for the police.

In the second half of the 19th century, the prison was frequently visited by the writer Leo Tolstoy. He came there while working on his novel “Resurrection.” Tolstoy met with the revolutionary prisoner Yegor Lazarev, who became the prototype for the character Nabatov. He also often spoke with Mikhail Vinogradov, a prison guard who later left written memories of his meetings with the writer.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Butyrka and its staff found themselves in the center of revolutionary events. During the December uprising of 1905, workers from the Miussky tram depot (today the site of a large Moscow food court) tried to storm the prison to free political prisoners. Several attacks were made, but each time the guards repelled them.

Between 1910 and 1917, Butyrka held several famous political prisoners: anarchist Nestor Makhno, Ivan Kalyayev (the assassin of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov), and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

In the 1930s, Varlam Shalamov, the repressed writer and future author of Kolyma Tales, was imprisoned there. At that time, the facility came under the jurisdiction of the OGPU and later the NKVD. Around then, a women’s block was established, separated from the men’s section so that inmates of the two wings could not meet.

Just before World War II, the future rocket designer Sergei Korolev, who would later launch Yuri Gagarin into space, also passed through Butyrka. During the war, the prison again played a role in national history.

In 1941, during the German advance on Moscow, the 23rd Potsdam Division of the Wehrmacht was surrounded near Volokolamsk. Some of its soldiers were captured, including Heinz Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s favorite nephew. According to preserved documents, Heinz was sent to Butyrka Prison, where he died in February 1942 under unclear circumstances.

During the late Soviet era, Butyrka held relatively few political prisoners. It had fully become a pretrial detention center (SIZO), and no longer served as a site for long-term sentences.

In the 1970s, Butyrka entered film history. Director Tatyana Lioznova shot several episodes of her iconic series “Seventeen Moments of Spring” inside the prison, using it to depict Gestapo cells.

In the 1990s, Butyrka gained a grim reputation among inmates — not because of guard brutality, but due to its age and overcrowded conditions. “I will never forget the packed cells,” recalls Alexey, who was detained there for fraud. “A cell for eight people held twenty. We slept in turns. The air was heavy, foul, unsanitary. The prison’s unique feature is that the exercise yard is on the roof. When inmates were taken for a walk, chaos started. Once, one man — an acrobat — jumped over the outer wall and escaped. I don’t know what happened to him later.”

Alexey also recalls the former women’s block, where by his time authorities had moved inmates undergoing psychiatric evaluation. “The windows faced a residential courtyard, so relatives could shout messages from below — you could hear everything clearly. No need for prison mail.”

He remembers another detail — “roads” made from unraveled socks. “We’d pull the threads out of socks and twist cords together. They became ‘roads’ used to move forbidden items — drugs, phones — from one cell to another, through holes in the toilets. All done at night.”

Since the days of the Hussar regiment, Butyrka has grown significantly — today it includes around 30 three-story buildings, though only one tower remains — the Pugachev Tower. It is now the largest pretrial detention center in Moscow.

The average shared cell in Butyrka is about 6 by 12 meters, around 72 square meters. There are also smaller “special cells” for high-profile or wealthy detainees. These usually hold three inmates and are called “triplets” by prisoners. Today, Butyrka has 434 cells, including 101 general ones (around 72 m² each). Originally, such cells were meant for 20–25 people, and while they now hold slightly more, by prison standards they are still relatively spacious. There are about three times as many smaller cells.