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| Russian prison for sale |
| By NewsMax.com |
| Published: 07/28/2006 |
 For sale: An 18th-century prison in the heart of Moscow. The price: Up to $300 million, property experts in Russia estimate. The catch: The buyer must build a new pre-trial detention center in the Moscow area. The Justice Ministry is seeking to unload Butyrskaya Prison, built by Empress Catherine the Great, as part of a $2 billion overhaul of the Russian prison system, which includes construction of 26 new jails, the Moscow Times reports. "We are ready to sell it if we can find a business partner willing to build a similar detention facility in the Moscow region,” said Yury Kalinin, the country's top prison official. Butyrskaya widely known as Butyrka was built in 1771 as a military facility, but converted to a prison three years later. Its first famous prisoner was Yemelyan Pugachev, leader of an uprising of peasants and Cossacks. Dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize-winning author, also served time there. Butyrskaya is recognized as a historical landmark and is protected by the state, which could pose a problem for developers. But other Russian landmarks have been demolished. In the 1990s, the prison had up to 70 inmates crammed into cells designed for 20, but the population has been cut in half since then and the jail now holds about 4,000 prisoners. Ivan Korolyov, a young activist who spent most of 2005 in the prison for taking part in a protest, said: "Of all the Moscow prisons, Butyrka really retains the aura of a dungeon with its curvy ceilings and thick brick walls.” |
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