VLADIMIR PRISON (also Vladimir Jail; before the revolution – Vladimir Central Prison)

VLADIMIR PRISON (also Vladimir Jail, before the revolution – Vladimir Central Prison) – one of the oldest penitentiary institutions in Russia (built in 1783), located not far from Moscow in the city of Vladimir. From 1937, the prison was used to hold especially dangerous criminals, and until 1953, its inmates were mainly high-profile political prisoners: leaders of foreign states (e.g., the Baltic countries), military and political officials from Germany and Japan, relatives of Soviet leaders, and famous émigrés captured abroad. Until 1954, the names of some prisoners (several dozen people) were encoded by numbers. After Stalin’s death, the main contingent of the USSR MVS prison (od-1/st.2) consisted of recidivist criminals, but until 1978 it was also used to hold political prisoners (from 1960, it was the only such prison in the USSR), both those sentenced to prison and those transferred from camps for “violation of the regime.” The conditions of confinement in Vladimir Prison were particularly harsh; in the post-Stalin period, world attention was drawn to this problem by Anatoly Marchenko’s book My Testimony. From 1968, the situation of the prison’s political prisoners and their struggle for their rights became a constant theme of the “Chronicle of Current Events.” The political prisoners of Vladimir Prison took a most active part in establishing the Day of the Political Prisoner in the USSR and in the struggle for the Status of a Political Prisoner . The prisoners’ resistance reached a particular scale in the summer of 1974 after the transfer of Vladimir Bukovsky to the prison. In 1978, by a decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU, all political prisoners held there were transferred to Chistopol Prison . Currently, Vladimir Prison is used to hold especially dangerous recidivists and persistent violators of the regime in correctional labor colonies; in the mid-1990s, a museum exhibition was opened in the prison.