7. Lubyanka prison in Moscow was in the basement of the secret police headquarters
The building above what is commonly known as Lubyanka prison was originally built by an insurance company, and was taken over by the Cheka, as the secret police was then known, after the Bolshevik revolution. It quickly became a building regarded with fear by Muscovites. Its small, two-story cellblock in the building’s basement was where dissidents, political enemies of the regime, suspected spies, and people denounced by others were taken and held during investigations by the Soviet secret police, which operated under several different names over the years. As documented by some who survived the process of interrogation – a euphemism for torture – which included Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lubyanka was a living hell for those taken there.
Nor was Solzhenitsyn the only person to describe some of what took place in the Lubyanka building over the lifetime of the Soviet Union. The Soviets themselves described Raoul Wallenberg dying while in custody in Lubyanka, though they gave other versions of his death as well. British diplomat and spy Bruce Lockhart worked with Sidney Reilly in 1918 in a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik regime before Reilly vanished into Lubyanka in the 1920s. Lockhart published the story in 1932. Later it was revealed that Reilly, who had worked extensively at espionage for the British, was tortured and interrogated at Lubyanka before being taken into the woods outside of Moscow and shot. Many of the officers of the Soviet Army purged by Stalin in the 1930s walked through the doors at Lubyanka, never to walk out again.