Butyrskaya prison (Russian: Бутырская тюрьма, tr.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.
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. The towers of the old fortress once housed the rebellious Streltsy during the reign of Peter I, 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.
Varlam Shalamov notes in one of his tales, that the Butyrka is extremely hot in summer; Eduard Limonov, in his dramaDeath 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. 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.
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
Jonas Žemaitis, Lithuanian general, head of the Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisan forces after World War II, shot to death in 1953;[3] later recognized as the fourth President of Lithuania in 2009
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