Sukhanovka, short for Sukhanovskaya osoborezhimnaya tyur'ma () 'Sukhanovo special-regime prison,' was a prison established by the

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...

under N. I. Yezhov in 1938 for "particularly dangerous enemies of the people" on the grounds of the old Ekaterinskaia Pustyn' Monastery near Vidnoye, just south of

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

. Known officially as Special Object 110 (), it was said to be worse than the Lubyanka, Lefortovo, or

Butyrka Butyrskaya prison (), usually known simply as Butyrka ( rus, Бутырка, p=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 Un ...

prisons in Moscow itself. From 1958 it was a jail hospital. During 1992 the prison was returned to the church as a monastery and on November 17, 1992, the first vows were made within its walls.

Conditions

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and Soviet dissidents, dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag pris ...

called it "the most terrible prison the MGB had." He went on to write that interrogators used the mere threat of being sent there to intimidate prisoners, and there was no way to question those who had been there as they either had been driven mad or were dead. He described the prison as comprising two buildings: one in which the prisoners were housed and the other containing 68 monastic cells where interrogations took place. The food was said to be the best of all the political prisons since the food was brought over from the nearby Architects' Rest Home, but the food ration for one architect in the home was divided among twelve prisoners and the prisoners were frequently tortured,

deprived of sleep Sleep deprivation, also known as sleep insufficiency or sleeplessness, is the condition of not having adequate duration and/or quality of sleep to support decent alertness, performance, and health. It can be either Chronic (medicine), chronic ...

and kept in solitary confinement, including in small, closet-like cells where they could not sit down or move; they were also left in hot and cold rooms to sweat or freeze, and were not allowed exercise outdoors.

Prisoners

NKVD head N. I. Yezhov was imprisoned in Sukhanovka beginning on 10 April 1939 and was interrogated there by the Main Military Procurator, N. P. Afanasyev. His trial took place in the office of the chief of the prison in February 1940, although he was executed in Moscow, on Varsonofevskii Lane, not far from the Lubyanka prison. Yezhov's long-time colleague

Filipp Goloshchyokin Filipp Isayevich Goloshchyokin () (born Shaya Itsikovich Goloshchyokin) () ( – October 28, 1941) was a Jewish-Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician, and party functionary. A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party s ...

was also held under "heavy interrogation" in Sukhanovka for a period of 12 months until he was transferred back to Butyrka, and subsequently to Kuibyshev where he was shot in October 1941. Solzhenitsyn wrote that Deputy Minister of State Security M. D. Ryumin used to personally beat and otherwise torture prisoners in a spacious office at the prison, making certain to cover the nice Persian carpet with a cloth so as not to spatter it with the prisoners' blood.

Alexander Dolgun Alexander Michael Dolgun (29 September 1926 – 28 August 1986) was an American inmate in the Soviet Gulag who wrote about his experiences in 1975 after being allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Pre-Gulag years Alexander Dolgun was born on ...

, a Polish-American worker imprisoned in the Gulag in the late 1940s, was sent to Sukhanovka twice, and is one of the few known to have survived the experience without losing his mind.Alexandr Dolgun and Patrick Watson, ''Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag'' (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975).

References

External links

Stalin's prison of tortures
{{coord, 55.5366, N, 37.6661, E, source:kolossus-dewiki, display=title Political repression in the Soviet Union Defunct prisons in Russia Prisons in the Soviet Union History of Moscow Oblast 1938 establishments in Russia 1953 disestablishments in the Soviet Union NKVD