Hos kamrat Stalin

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In 1938, on the orders of the NKVD [forerunner of the KGB and FSB] a secret detention centre was established in the former St Catherine’s Convent outside Moscow. Sukhanovskaya Prison, also known as Sukhanovka or Special Facility No.110, was set up to house the deadliest enemies of the Soviet Union, in general, and Comrade Stalin, in particular. Prisoners were not only held there for years without trial or even investigation, but were subjected to the most horrific tortures. Between 1938 and 1952 about 35,000 people passed through its gates, and few of them came out alive. And until recently all information relating to this facility was locked away in FSB archives, marked ‘secret.’

Among Sukhanovka’s prisoners over the years were well-known politicians and public figures, members of the cultural elite, and military commanders. They included bloodthirsty NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov and his associates, responsible for carrying out the Great Terror of the 1930s; writer Isaac Babel, Sergei Efron, a former White Army officer and the husband of poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who was recruited by the NKVD while in emigration in Paris and arrested on his return to the USSR. Among senior military figures executed there were Marshal of Aviation Sergei Khudyakov, General Pavel Ponedelin and Admiral Konstantin Samoilov; and even Alexander Beloborodov and Filipp Goloshchokin, the murderers of the Tsar and his family, ended their days in the prison.

kamrat Stalin