Novinskaya Women’s Prison

From the moment the prison opened, Princess Elizaveta Mikhailovna Vadbolskaya served as its director. In the memoirs of imprisoned revolutionaries, she is often described not as someone distinguished by her demeanor or intellect, but as someone who behaved towards prisoners “like a capricious, all-powerful lady walking over her housemaids.” However, while they spoke disdainfully of the prison’s matriarch, political prisoners respectfully described the order established in the prison, which was rather severe, but not suffocating. This was supported by the good upbringing of prison matrons, who shared the liberal views of the political prisoners. According to the memoirs of I. Kakhovskaya and E. Nikitina, the prisoners quickly befriended many of the matrons, who would bring forbidden newspapers to their cells. The prison staff’s friendly behavior led to the escape of 13 political prisoners, along with the matron who assisted them, on the night of July 1, 1909. After this incident, Princess Vadbolskaya was demoted to assistant director of the prison, and she remained in this position up until 1921. The prison regime was toughened, and the matrons’ responsibility increased. According to the mayor of Moscow, Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovskii—from 1913 onwards, the head of the Special Corps of Gendarmes—the Secret Police Department (Okhrana) had participated in the escape. The motive he suggested was the wish to discredit the prison inspector Dmitrii Iuferov, who had not allowed the Okhrana into the prisons or permitted them to recruit agents from among the political prisoners. This perspective is confirmed by circumstantial evidence, but its validity has not been proven.

After the revolution, Novinskaya Prison’s population changed significantly: by 1926 the number of prisoners had grown to 400, exceeding the original capacity of 242 prisoners. According to Princess Kurakina’s memoirs of her imprisonment in Novinskaya Prison, the vast majority of the prisoners were criminals: “The Novinskaya Women’s Prison was a special prison for the entire female criminal element, for the lowest and most repulsive women.” There were no more than 15 political prisoners. If before the revolution political prisoners were imprisoned separately, then they were placed in common cells with ordinary criminals during the Soviet period. The prisoners’ diet also changed: if the convicts’ memoirs did not discuss the shortage or poor quality of food before the revolution, then afterwards political prisoners, such as O.E. Chernova-Kolbasina, wrote about the constant feeling of hunger that they experienced in Novinskaya. The basic ration usually consisted of soup with rotten fish and corned beef and a bread ration that always changed with the country’s food deficit. Prisoners organized revolts on several occasions due to impossibility of eating rotten soup.

During the Second World War the composition of the Novinskaya prisoner population changed frequently and drastically, although we still do not have sources that can help explain these changes. During the evacuation in 1941, 430 women were transferred from the prison, and on October 20, 1941, only 50 prisoners were counted in Novinskaya Prison. However, in January 1943, the prisoner limit was raised to 400 and the actual number of inmates reached up to 1,000. Afterwards, the prison population decreased and by the end of the war it was fluctuating between 200-400 inmates. Information about the number of prisoners was lost when the prison was closed for reconstruction. In 1963, in the course of a reconstruction of central Moscow, the main office of the Council of Economic Security was built on the site of the former prison.