July 21, 2021

Russian jail horror story: “Escobar’s black site” found under St. Petersburg

topic:	Political violence
located:	Russia
editor:	Andrew Getto

In the middle of July, an immigrant worker discovered a structure half an hour away from St. Petersburg. It rattled him so much that he reached out to the press. Local journalists found a house behind a partially scavenged 3.5-meter wall. Inside they saw a sharp decline that resembled an underground parking entrance. The reporters went on and bumped into metal gates, decorated with enigmatic mafia-related graffiti. After a while, the picture was clear: the place was designed to look exactly like a Russian jail.

The 15x15-meter facility was built by the book. There are three cells with bunk beds and two more for the newly arrived, plus a room for guards with extra protection. Locks are identical to those used in Kresty, or the Crosses - the biggest detention center in St. Petersburg. A large space in the middle of the bunker was flooded, and it’s unclear if there is a pass leading deeper. 

Outside the house lay the debris of a sauna - a must-have addition for any Russian country house. Except, normally saunas are heated by wood, and that one had bags of coal everywhere. There was also a secret compartment in the floor that looked exactly like a human-sized oven.

Last year, the Investigative Committee, one of the all-mighty law agencies created under Vladimir Putin, inspected the area. They spent 18 months examining every inch, and found traces of biological tissue in the supposed crematorium. Then, in a bit of an anticlimactic move, the investigators shrugged, put the file in the drawer and classified it. 

Details about the landlords might help us understand their change of behavior. The original owner, identified by the press, had served as a jail officer for many years, and the current one goes by a name incredibly exotic to the Russian ear. In 2010, distinctly Armenian Mr. Mkrtychyan from the Baltic island city of Kronshtadt legally became Mr. Escobar. The years he spent behind bars for kidnapping, extortion and robbery may or may not explain the choice.

Now, my question is: why would one spend up to $1 million to build a meticulous imitation of a jail? It’s hard to imagine how dark are the things that you can’t do to inmates in an actual Russian prison. Denying treatment of pancreatitis to an anti-corruption lawyer until he dies? Done that. Torture people on camera? Here’s a video from a penal colony in Yaroslavl. Whatever that might be, within an hour since the publication the Investigative Committee called excavators and trucks and buried the entrance under a thick layer of earth. Zero comments were given.

Here’s my take on the situation. Let us say your friend is a career prison official. He helps you design something as similar to his beloved place of work as he can. Now, let’s say there is a businessman in St. Petersburg, who doesn’t want to share. One day, he finds himself dragged in a car, then handcuffed and blindfolded. An uncomfortable 30-minute ride leads to the sounds of dogs barking and guards moving metal gates. He realizes: hey, this looks familiar. It’s a jail.

It looks like one at first, anyway. In a while, the unlucky entrepreneur starts to think it’s too rough even for a Russian jail. When he mentions his lawyer for the tenth time, you give him a rundown. It’s a special kind of jail, and in this (currently flooded) room all sorts of things can take place, until he gives you what you want. After it’s done, a sauna outside will help you manage the information flow about your own little Abu Ghraib prison.

CIA and police black sites, overseas and inside the United States, have been making headlines for many years. It’s reasonable to imagine that something similar exists in Russia. What’s different is that itis not necessarily used by any government agency. Also, there is a hole for burning people.

If we have a mock prison, everything is possible. Is there a mock court performing a charade of justice? Not that hard to imagine - look at any of Alexei Navalny’s trials. And since the Russian judiciary branch is a travesty, could there be a mock parliament full of dummies? How different is it from the actual one? It’s hard to guess the size of this parallel state, and it’s getting harder to tell which one you’re dealing with.

Image: Ye Jinghan.