Inside the FSB prison where Evan Gershkovich will be kept in solitary confinement

Just a short metro ride from Russia’s FSB headquarters in central Moscow, Lefortovo Prison has been a place of misery since it was built in 1881.

This hulking primrose-coloured building is where the Kremlin sends its most high-profile prisoners before convicting them of various crimes and sending them to camps in Siberia.

And it is here that the American journalist Evan Gershkovich has been interned since he was arrested by Russian FSB security agents on Wednesday evening and accused of spying.

Designed to break inmates mentally and physically, people sent to Lefortovo spend 23 hours a day locked alone in a basic cell.

Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer who has defended espionage suspects, said that the concept behind the prison is “total information isolation”.

“No calls, no visits, no newspapers, nothing,” he told AP. “It’s one of the tools of suppression.”

Fracturing tough minds

British-American Paul Whelan spent 18 months in Lefortovo before being sent to a prison colony eight hours' drive from Moscow in June 2020 after being convicted of spying.

Other former inmates include Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, Swedish Second World War diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and the West German student Mathias Rust, who landed a light aeroplane on Red Square in 1987.

Lefortovo aims to fracture tough minds and to extract confessions before show trials.

The techniques used by the guards and interrogators are simple but effective, refined over years. Inmates are subject to regular interrogations, allowed one bath per week and have to adapt to the lights being on in their cells all day and night.

People who have lived through stints in the prison describe how skilled interrogators switch between playing the “nice guy” one moment to the “tough guy” the next.

“Interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills,” wrote Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian-British human rights activist, of his stay in Lefortovo Prison in 1971.

He described to an American newspaper how prison guards forced an oversized tube down his nose to feed him when he attempted a hunger strike to complain about conditions.

Josef Stalin's favourite

Named after one of Peter the Great’s favourite generals, the prison was a favourite of the KGB and dictator Josef Stalin’s NKVD security services during the Soviet Union.

They processed thousands of people through the facility during the height of The Purges in the 1930s, when millions of people were detained for alleged anti-Communiust sentiment and then either killed, often at Lefortovo, or sent to camps in Siberia.

In his book Secrets Laid Bare, Michael Voslensky, the Soviet dissident and historian, described how Stalin’s NKVD “operated an outsized meat grinder” at Lefortovo to destroy bodies.

But Mr Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who has been based in Russia since 2017, will face a different fate.

Commentators familiar with Russia’s tactics around prisoner-taking said that the Kremlin had effectively “kidnapped” him to use as a bargaining chip to negotiate prisoner swaps with the US, as it did with Brittney Griner.

The American basketball player was released in December in return for international arms dealer Viktor Bout after being arrested for bringing liquid cannabis into Russia.

For Mr Gershkovich, this is likely to mean months in prison as Russia generally takes its time handing down espionage convictions before starting negotiations on a prisoner swap.

Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia, said that Lefortovo Prison was at the centre of the Kremlin's “hostage-taking" statecraft.

“Poor Evan is presumably going to sit in prison until a swap with (real) spies can be arranged,” he said.