Lefortovo Prison

Lefortovo Prison (Russian: Лефортовская тюрьма) is a prison in Moscow, Russia, which, since 2005, has been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. It was built in 1881. It was named after the Lefortovo District of Moscow where it is located, which in turn took its name from Franz Lefort, a close associate of Tsar Peter I the Great.

During the Great Purge, Lefortovo prison was used by NKVD for interrogations with torture. Lefortovo was an infamous KGB prison and investigative isolator (Russian: СИЗО, следственный изолятор) in the Soviet Union for detainment of political prisoners. 

In 1994, it was transferred to the MVD; and, from 1996 to 2005, it was handed back to the FSB, a successor of the KGB.

Notable prisoners

• Several members of the August Coup
• Igor Artimovich
• Vasily Blyukher
• Vladimir Bukovsky
• Nicholas Daniloff
• Svetlana Davydova
• Alexander Dolgun
• Dmitri Dudko
• Hugo Eberlein
• Rashid Khan Gaplanov, Education and Finance Minister of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic
• Yevgenia Ginzburg
• Nikolai Glushkov
• Chingiz Ildyrym, Azerbaijani Bolshevik and statesman
• Ekaterina Kalinina
• Vladimir Kirpichnikov
• Eston Kohver
• Zoya Krakhmalnikova, Soviet Christian dissident
• Platon Lebedev
• Eduard Limonov
• Alexander Litvinenko
• Vil Mirzayanov
• Levon Mirzoyan
• Osip Piatnitsky
• Leonid Razvozzhayev
• Ian Rokotov
• Mathias Rust, the 18-year-old German who landed a Cessna 172airplane near Red Square.
• Valery Sablin
• Natan Sharansky
• Andrei Sinyavsky
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Igor Sutyagin
• Nadezhda Ulanovskaya, wife of Alexander Ulanovsky
• Raoul Wallenberg