Faithful commenter, Aleks, reminded me about St. Petersburg’s Kresti Prison. This dovetails neatly with an earlier post about Anna Akhmatova.
The Kresti is one of Russia’s oldest prisons and it’s where Anna’s first husband and son Lev spent quite some uncomfortable time. In this video you can see it on the opposite bank from the Sphinx. There’s also a still here.
Anna spent seventeen months standing in line to get food to Lev. One day, another mother recognised her as the writer and asked – in a very tentative, guarded whisper - ‘Can you describe this?’ Anna replied, ‘Yes, I think I can’. The incident became the preface to Anna’s ‘Requiem‘ – the definitive poem about Stalin’s oppression.
The Kresti is what they call a ‘pre-trial’ prison, which is Russian for ‘you just get locked up’. Its reputation hasn’t improved. In 1999, a survey found 58% of inmates indulging IDU (injected drug abuse), actually the highest proportion in the world.
Aleks notes that his favourite hostel down the street has been closed. Maybe some connection . . .
