14 January 2026
by Lev Shlosberg*
Source: Novaya Gazeta
On the morning of 6 December, my first day in the remand prison, the deputy head of the facility accompanied me to my cell after the inspection and said: ‘This cell is now your home. You must keep it tidy.’ The atmosphere at home was, of course, somewhat different.
But quite quickly, in literally two or three days, I realised that, despite being moved to the remand prison, my sense of home had not disappeared. It is not a feeling tied to specific walls – whether family or state-owned – no, it is my sense of Pskov as home.
Before being remanded in custody, I couldn’t have imagined this. Being in the Pskov prison, I feel at home because I am in Pskov.
The feeling of my hometown passed invisibly through the prison walls and quietly said to me: ‘You are at home here. Don’t worry. I am with you.’ I felt it and understood.
Many events in our family’s life are connected with Nekrasov Street. Here, from pre-revolutionary times until 1974, stood the house that became the Alesin family home in 1938, to which the elderly printer Mendel Alesin and his 16-year-old grandson, my future father Mark, returned from evacuation in 1945.
Here, for two centuries, has stood the building of the former No. 2, later No. 8 school (at the time of its construction in the early 20th century it was the Mariinsky Girls’ Gymnasium, now the Pskov Technical Lyceum), where my grandfather, the artist and teacher Yevsei Berkal, taught before and after the war; his children studied here — his son Khone (a 1941 graduate who fought throughout the war) and his daughter Bronislava, my mother, who later taught chemistry and biology to children at this very school. I myself spent 10 years at school here from 1970 to 1980, and my sister Irina studied here too.
On this very street (on the site of the current telephone exchange building) stood the Pskov Registry Office, where my parents got married in 1962.
On this very street is the House of Soviets, where I served as a deputy of the Pskov Regional Assembly from 2011 to 2021; this was the place of my service as a civic representative.
Yabloko’s Pskov office has been operating on this very street since 2015; my workplace remains here.
And on this very street is Pskov Prison, where I now find myself. Many members of our family have walked past this building, but I have ended up inside it. Yet I feel at home in any building on this street, in any part of Pskov. This is my city; there are no unfamiliar places here for me.
The Pskov Prison Fortress is one of the first so-called ‘modernised’ buildings to appear in Pskov as a result of the city’s redevelopment in accordance with the master plan approved by Catherine II in the mid-1770s. The almost straight streets of Gogol and Nekrasov (under different names, of course) appeared at that very time in place of the old, winding Pskov streets that had grown up since the Middle Ages. It was not possible to redevelop the whole of Pskov into ‘blocks,’ as this would have required the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, but the space between Petropavlovskaya Street (now Marx Street), Gubernatorskaya (now Nekrasov), Mikhailovskaya (now Spegalsky) and Ivanovskaya** (now Gogol) emerged precisely at the end of the 18th century and was subsequently set aside for a large state institution — a prison.
The design of the Pskov prison complex, like all public buildings of that era, was approved by the highest (imperial) authority. That said, the building itself was a standard design; in each city, the project was adapted to the local terrain.
The Pskov prison complex is a cultural monument of regional significance. I had never taken a detailed interest in its history, but now I am seeing this complex of buildings from the inside. Within this space lies a vast number of artefacts, ready-made museum pieces. I do not know whether they are included in the scope of the preservation order that applies to the architectural features of the building itself. Cell doors with wrought-iron locks, upon which dozens of layers of oil paint have fused together. Hand-forged bolts with ornate scrolls. Enormous padlocks with 15-centimetre keys, the keys themselves featuring large rings and deep grooves. Authentic window grilles from the early 19th century, set into the walls during their construction. Metal staircases. Metal grilles on almost every opening.
All this creates a unique interior where, if desired, one could shoot films set in either the 20th or the 19th century; one need only conceal the electronics. This celebration of metal makes itself heard every minute: clanking, clattering, banging, ringing and creaking. Metal produces every conceivable sound; it speaks its own language. These sounds could be recorded for film and theatre soundtracks. It is all authentic.
Pskov Prison Fortress is practically a ready-made museum spanning several eras — and an authentic one at that, where nothing needs to be imitated.
We simply need to preserve this space, this almost-ready prison exhibition, and fill it with exhibits preserved in the archives of various institutions, and develop this area — with its powerful, independent historical and cultural energy — tactfully and carefully.
How many eras have passed within these walls. ‘The glorious beginning of Aleksandr’s days’. The cold decades of Nicholas I. The great reforms of Aleksandr II, including the abolition of serfdom. The country’s regression and stagnation under Aleksandr III. The tragedy-filled era of Nikolai II: the first Russian revolution of the 20th century (1905–1907), the catastrophe of the First World War, the fall of the autocracy. Then came the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War, during which Pskov, along with its prison, passed from the hands of the Whites to the Reds, to the rogue detachments of Bulak-Balakhovich, and to the Germans. The New Economic Policy and the hopes it raised. Stalinist repressions. The German occupation during the Second World War, Stalin’s repressions once more, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, the death throes of the Soviet system, the collapse of the USSR, Yeltsin’s incomplete decade, and the entire first quarter of the 21st century — under Putin from its first day.
The state structure and political systems changed, heads of state and government, flags in the city, authorities of all levels and types rose to power and faded into history, but the prison (exactly as it was built in the early 19th century) proved necessary to all authorities without exception. These walls suited everyone. No one dared to alter the prison; no one abandoned the prison fortress. And the prison fortress outlived them all.
People within these walls went mad with loneliness and despair, wept, confessed and repented of crimes they had not committed, screamed and died under torture, begged for mercy, remained silent as stones, refused to betray, dreamed of freedom and were released. All the walls here bear witness to thousands upon thousands of fates, the memory of many of which history has not preserved.
A museum should be established here, of course, when the authorities (who knows when?) begin to consider a different, modern approach to prison — as a place that no one could ever be sure they would never end up in.
The phenomenon of the Russian prison will find its researchers, because prison in its current form, prison as a place of confinement, has become part of the Russian cultural code and has entered Russian politics.
Prison has become an image and a model of the state itself, forming part of the foundations of state power and the fabric of social life.
Russia’s parting with this form of prison and of life itself would be a parting from the lack of freedom that has permeated the very air above the country, where every cemetery holds the graves of those who have served time.
In the future museum of the Pskov Prison Fortress, of course, it will not be possible to preserve every trace of human existence. Tears will dry, restoration will conceal the scars of the ages, and the museum’s spotlights will ennoble even death itself, which dwells within these walls. But a prison museum is necessary — to make sense of the past and as a tribute to the memory of those whose lives were cut short within these walls, as atonement for sins, as a sign of parting from a state of unfreedom, as a symbol of the country’s release from imprisonment into freedom.
And the new remand prison must be surrounded by a park, where the trees will rustle beneath the prison windows, reminding people on both sides of the bars of the transience of life.
Pskov Prison Fortress
* The Russian Ministry of Justice considers politician Lev Shlosberg a ‘foreign agent’.
** Gogol Street was previously called Ivanovskaya Street, as it was home to two Ivanovskaya churches, neither of which has survived to the present day. This street also has an even older history. The architect and restorer Y.P. Spegalsky writes in his book Pskov: ‘The present-day Gogol Street, in the section near the Pechko House, has retained the width and direction of the ancient Nikolskaya Street, which passed here from the junction at the Church of the Intercession from Torg to the Monastery of St Nicholas of Peskov (today, Lapina Gorka stands on the site of the Nikolsky Monastery). Nikolskaya Street existed for the most part as early as the mid-18th century and is shown almost in its entirety on the 1740 map…’
Translated by RiR
