Sukhanovka

Sukhanovka is a prison established by the NKVD in 1938 for "particularly dangerous enemies of the people" on the grounds of the old Ekaterinskaia Pustyn' Monastery in the village of Vidnoe, outside of Moscow near Lenin's Gorki dacha.¹ It was said to be worse than the Lubyanka, Lefortovo, or Butyrka (also Butyrki) prisons in Moscow itself.

Conditions

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called it "the most terrible prison the MGB had." [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Gulag Archipelago" (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 181; See also Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, "Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940" (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 182-183; S. Iu. Iushakov and A. A. Stukalov, "Front Voennykh Prokurorov" (Moscow, 2000), 69. ] He went on to write that interrogators simply used the threat of being sent there to intimidate and cow prisoners, and there was no way to question those who had been there as they had either been driven mad or were dead. [Solzhenitsyn, "Gulag Archipelago", 181.] He described the prison as comprising two buildings: one in which the prisoners were housed, and the other, with 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 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 out of doors. [Solzhenitsyn, "Gulag Archipelago", 181-184.]

Cases

NKVD head N. I. Ezhov 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. [Jensen and Petrov, "Stalin's Loyal Executioner," 187.]

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 the prisoners' blood on it. [Solzhenitsyn, "Gulag Archipelago", 126.]

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

References