Prison Tour Offers Visitors Journey to the Center of Darkest St. Petersburg

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Every day the people come and stand, turning their backs on one of St. Petersburg’s prettiest views across the Neva River and facing one of its ugliest, a grimy red-brick facade looming out of the last century.

As if performing some strange communal rite, they wave their arms in mysterious coded rhythm, like a stand of trees in a storm. They are tracing letters with their hands, sending airborne messages of love and hope across the two high brick walls, across the bands of razor ribbon, to the men who watch and wait in the cells of Kresty Prison.

Not far away, another group gathers at the jail’s entrance, huddled in chilly anticipation of a macabre tourist experience, a trip into the black heart of Russia’s prison system.

It costs visitors $2 a ticket to wander for an hour along a darker road less traveled, to dip a toe in someone else’s nightmare. On the inside, they breathe the stale, pungent air and glimpse a world with harder rules. The admission price is twice what they would pay to see all the riches in the Hermitage museum on the other side of the river. For foreigners, there’s a special price: $10.

Here, the tourists are told, is a jail built in 1892, then housing a single prisoner per cell. The cells, a little more than 2 yards wide and 4 yards long, have changed little, except that each now holds six bunks and houses 12 prisoners--up to 14, according to one account. Designed for 3,000, the prison now holds more than 10,000 inmates, 600 of whom have tuberculosis or are suspected of having it.

Kresty--The Crosses--is a notorious St. Petersburg landmark, a gloomy red blot on the horizon that riverboat tour guides never fail to point out. The crumbling hulk is named for its shape, with two main cross-shaped blocks, but the name recalls the days when suspected criminals were punished by crucifixion.

In the Soviet era, what went on inside prisons was one of the state’s darkest secrets. When the prison opened its doors to tourists in August, queues of the morbidly curious were so long that the tickets kept selling out. Now the novelty is fading.

Visitors to the jail may set out lightly on their outing on a sunny autumnal Sunday, but they are soon plunged into surroundings so grim, they seem plucked from the pages of Charles Dickens. And yet what they see is only a pallid version of the reality of life inside.

“It was unpleasant,” visitor Marina Shatrovskaya, 34, says. “The entire impression is very gloomy and throws you into a sad mood.”

Prison chief Alexander I. Zhitenyov throws up several motives for opening his doors and inviting tourists--explanations that seem tailored to all audiences, from reactionaries to liberals to pragmatists. He says it provides transparency and openness, and brings in limited funds for the prison. Most of all, he argues, seeing the horrors that lie within is a compelling deterrent to a life of crime.

Conditions inside are grim, he admits. “I’ve heard little that’s positive in public opinion about this place. People think that these are criminals and the worse the conditions, the better--because that means they suffer more,” he says.

Yet these aren’t high-security convicts. Kresty is a detention center where the vast majority are still awaiting trial. And some have been waiting for years.

The $2 tour is like visiting an anthill where all the ants have mysteriously disappeared. In eerily silent corridors, the only visible creatures are a couple of softly padding cats. Overhead, the layers of steel grills and wire mesh diffuse the light before it can penetrate.

Although her first tour of the jail was disappointing because of the lack of action, Yulia Shatrovskaya 13, a skinny blond girl with cornflower-blue eyes, liked it enough to come back a second time with her father, Valery, a warden, and her mother, Marina. “I thought they’d show us more. I wanted to see the prisoners taking a walk. I thought it would be more lively,” she says, wide-eyed.

When the weekend is over and the tourists are gone, the corridors echo with the sharp sounds of routine prison clatter, like a creaky machine relentlessly grinding up its fodder in one of William Blake’s dark satanic mills.

Several prisoners move from cell to cell, slopping watery gray barley porridge from large steel cans into tin bowls and passing them through small trapdoors.

Groups of prisoners, their faces gray and expressionless and their hands behind their backs, march single file back to their cells from the exercise yards. Somewhere a dog barks savagely.

Inmates are allowed one hour of exercise a day in bleak concrete pens with dirt floors that are no bigger than their cells. They can see the sky through heavy dark wire. Only a minority of inmates take up the offer.

The weekend tourists are allowed to see one vacant cell. But the bare walls and bunks don’t convey the airless claustrophobia of a day later, when the space is crowded with a dozen shaven-headed young men.

Then, some of the men smile dizzily when their routine is interrupted. Others stare with bored hostility. Some just lie looking wearily at the ceiling.

The art tattooed on limbs and torsos expresses a brash, confident aggression that is absent in the eyes of most of the young men here. Nearly all of the inmates seem worn down. Many have sores erupting on their skulls.

Most of the floor space is occupied by two three-tiered metal bunks where the inmates sleep in shifts. A postcard of John Travolta sits on a shelf among the personal belongings of the most dominant cellmate. To one side of the cell is a grubby toilet bowl.

It is difficult to conduct interviews in a cramped cell with a prison guard looming at the side.

One prisoner, Yuri, has been waiting four years for his extortion trial. He has spent more than half his 38 years in children’s institutions and jails and has lived in cells where the cigarette smoke was “so thick you could hang an ax in the air. Thank God we don’t have any smokers in here.”

A loud figure, Yuri isn’t afraid to speak up. Ignoring the guard, he launches into a discourse on rape in prison. The worst thing in prison life, he says, is “when they run a normal person down and turn him into a passive homosexual. It can happen to anybody, for nothing. They don’t even have to have a special reason.”

The issue of rape is hinted at, on the prison tour, for those who look carefully. On a wall displaying photos of tattoos is a poster showing the coded bands that prisoners have tattooed on their fingers like signet rings, each telling a secret about the prisoner. A band bearing a crown indicates a criminal leader. Others indicate which crime a prisoner committed. There also are bands that are tattooed by force to brand a prisoner as an outcast, as a slave to other prisoners, and as a target for prison rape.

With guards listening to the interviews, no one inside the prison walls can detail the way the place really works. That task falls to Igor Y. Pavlov, 22, who spent 2 1/2 years inside on a robbery charge.

Waiting outside with those writing letters in the air, he watches a paper cone sail past and land nearby. He scurries to pick up the message, sent by a blowpipe made from newspaper by his friends inside.

The way to survive in Kresty is to find yourself a prison “family,” Pavlov says.

“They think you’re live bait. For the first couple of days, everyone is listening and studying you very carefully. If you ask too many questions or display too much interest, they think you’re sent by the police,” he says. “If they decide you’re cool, the family will look after you.”

Outcasts are used as slaves and are forced to surrender any food parcels sent by their families. “They make your life really miserable. They treat you like a dog,” Pavlov says.

The prison operates like a microcosm of Russia’s corrupt economy, with everything divided up and sold off. It costs $100 to buy a good cell with a TV and a location overlooking the street, with a view of the air-writers who appear with their daily messages. Some cells even have a phone, Pavlov claims.

“It’s all for money. The entire prison has been sold up lock, stock and barrel. If you want vodka, you pay and they [the guards] deliver it,” he says. “There is heroin, narcotics, whatever you want.”

Even the jail tour seems like a distorted sort of commerce. The guide offers tourists small, ugly models of prisoners and their jailers, fashioned by inmates out of stodgy black bread that they chew up, make into dough, model and paint. The model guard, priced at $1.20, is the nastiest, with a pig’s snout, cunning eyes and a curly tail.

More ambitious prisoners have used the dough to make realistic guns or grenades, which they concealed in hollowed-out books, now on display in the prison museum.

Yuri Sizov and his wife, Lyudmila, whose son Konstantin, 34, is awaiting trial on charges that he killed his girlfriend, see the prison tours as immoral. “They’re making money out of someone else’s heartbreak,” Lyudmila Sizov says.

Former inmate Pavlov, who has seen TV reports on the prison tours, also finds the idea disturbing. “The real situation is much more terrifying. The worst thing is that you see your mates and yourself degrading. You come from a free world into a world where the rules are different. You see yourself getting bent. You become embittered and aggressive,” he says. “The most important thing, when you walk out, is you need to become a human being again, and not remain a beast.”

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.