'You cannot see anybody, and you are completely alone': Inside the infamous Russian prison holding WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich.
Guards patrolling hundreds of cells at the sprawling facility on the outskirts of Moscow bang their keys together to signal that an inmate is being escorted from their cells to an interrogation room, according to former prisoners, their families and their lawyers. Others snap their fingers in the hallways, where fluorescent lights buzz day and night, a warning there should be no other prisoners in sight and as few personnel as possible.
To understand what life is like for Gershkovich, the Journal spoke to former Russian and American prisoners at Lefortovo, lawyers who have regularly visited and historians who have chronicled the facility’s grim place in Russian and Soviet lore. They described a sterile facility engineered to keep inmates from ever seeing one another, an isolation that makes Lefortovo hard to endure.• Detained reporter Evan Gershkovich loved Russia, the country that turned on himTrevor Reed, a U.S.
Gershkovich is likely in “quarantine,” former inmates and lawyers said, a procedure that normally lasts two weeks, during which inmates are held alone and tested for hepatitis B and other diseases. Lawyers concerned for his welfare say his status as a high-profile American prisoner could spare him some of the worst conditions and treatment that Russian detainees might face.
“Lefortovo is the most isolated place to be, and this is the torture,” said Marina Litvinenko, wife of the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. He spent 8 months in Lefortovo on a charge of exceeding the authority of his position. After Litvinenko was released and emigrated to London, he was fatally poisoned by polonium-210, a death that a U.K. inquiry said was probably ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “They wanted him to be broken,” Marina Litvinenko said.
After quarantine, Lefortovo prisoners are often housed in pairs, but have to be careful about how much to share with cellmates, said Ivan Pavlov, a lawyer who has represented dozens of detainees inside the complex, and who now lives in Germany. “It’s possible that the person in the cell would be informing for the FSB,” he said.
“It’s not until you start to get into the mid-’30s that it really established its reputation for being a place of horror,” said Giles Udy, a British historian who specializes in the Soviet prison system. To break the monotony, U.S. citizen and embassy worker Alexander Dolgun—arrested during a lunch break shortly before Christmas 1948—would pace the floor to calculate the exact distance he’d walked and imagine he was traveling the thousands of miles between Moscow and America. Dolgun, accused of espionage charges he denied, was released in 1956.
The FSB regained its investigative duties by presidential decree in 1996, according to Kommersant, along with effective control of the prison. It restored Lefortovo’s function as the detention center for those accused of treason, espionage, political corruption and other high crimes. Last year, FSB agents arrested Dmitry Kolke, a scientist with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, unplugged his intravenous line, removed him from his deathbed and took him to Lefortovo. He died there, said his family, who denied the charges that he spied for China. Ukrainian military officers, captured during the siege of Mariupol, are also being kept in the prison.
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