Butyrka prison

Catholic priest and a pro-independence activist from Belarus

Fabijan Abrantovich

nun of the Dominican Order and prominent figure in the Catholic Church in Russia

Anna Abrikosova

Russian historian and famed dissident during the 1960s; author of "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984"

Andrei Amalrik

Polish general and prime minister

Władysław Anders

serial killer, serial rapist and child molester executed in 1996

Valery Asratyan

writer, killed in 1940

Isaak Babel

Ukrainian anarchist

Aron Baron

Polish general and one of the leaders of anti-communist opposition in the 1970s

Mieczysław Boruta-Spiechowicz

Kazakh statesman

Alikhan Bukeikhanov

Polish general

Walerian Czuma

Cheka founder

Felix Dzerzhinsky

Russian statesman

Vladimir Dzhunkovsky

(Hebrew: יולי-יואל אדלשטיין, Russian: Ю́лий Ю́рьевич Эдельште́йн is an Israeli politician. One of the most prominent refuseniks in the Soviet Union, he has been Speaker of the Knesset since 2013

Yuli-Yoel Edelstein

Leonid Feodorov, Exarch and reputed bishop of the Russian Greek Catholic Church

Blessed

Education and Finance Minister of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic^[1]

Rashid Khan Gaplanov

author of Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind; mother of the writer Vasili Aksyonov; her books tell of her arrest during the 1937 purges in the city of Kazan, where she worked as a leading member of the local Communist Party structures of Tartary

Yevgenia Ginzburg

Soviet politician and party leader, was briefly held in Butyrka and sent to Kuibyshev and shot there in October 1941

Filipp Goloshchyokin

serial killer and the last person to be executed in Russia

Sergey Golovkin

aircraft designer

Dmitry Pavlovich Grigorovich

led to the "shares for freedom" transaction or Protocol No.6 (Протокол N.6. Доля свободы) that was signed by Minister for Press, Broadcasting and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Lesin

Vladimir Gusinsky

one of Adolf Hitler's personal physicians, died in captivity in 1950

Werner Haase

German dictator Adolf Hitler's favorite nephew, died after several days of torture in 1942

Heinz Hitler

spree killer executed in 1964

Vladimir Ionesyan

mob boss and thief in law

Vyacheslav Ivankov

Polish poet and futurist, killed in 1938

Bruno Jasieński

the 1967 World Rhythmic Gymnastics Champion, born in 1951 and spent her first two years living in Butyrki until her mother's pardon in 1953

Elena Karpuchina

Russian footballer

Aleksandr Kokorin

Russian rocket and spacecraft designer

Sergei Korolev

German human rights lawyer kidnapped in the American sector of Berlin in July 1952, executed 15 December 1953

Walter Linse

Alexander Litvinenko

Zygmunt Łoziński, Catholic bishop of Minsk

Blessed

lawyer, whose 2009 death in Matrosskaya Tishina Prison led to a 2009 Russian law forbidding jailing of tax criminals and also to the Magnitsky Act being passed by the US Congress in 2012.

Sergei Magnitsky

Ukrainian anarchist

Nestor Makhno

Russian footballer

Pavel Mamayev

poet

Vladimir Mayakovsky

SS-Brigadeführer and war criminal, executed in January 1947

Günther Merk

Polish general, last commander of the Armia Krajowa, killed in Butyrki in 1946

Leopold Okulicki

president of the Republic of Estonia when it became occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940

Konstantin Päts

SS-Officer

Unto Parvilahti

Soviet aeronautical engineer

Nikolai Polikarpov

Soviet linguist, orientalist and polyglot who was executed in 1938^[2]

Yevgeny Polivanov

pretender to the Russian throne and leader of a Cossack insurrection in 1773–1774

Yemelyan Pugachev

serial killer detained in Butyrka during his trial

Sergei Ryakhovsky

writer and soviet dissident; wrote The Kolyma Tales

Varlam Shalamov

Lithuanian politician and general of the Lithuanian Army

Kazys Skučas

Nobel Prize laureate, writer and dissident; wrote The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Russian communist

Elena Stasova

Yugoslav communist activist and writer

Karlo Štajner

Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army

Baruch Steinberg

a pioneer of electronic music, the inventor of the theremin and an electronic eavesdropping bug

Léon Theremin

Avant-Garde playwright during the 1920s; apparently threw himself down a prison stairwell to avoid execution

Sergei Tretyakov

once the prime minister of Lithuania, died in this prison after Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940

Augustinas Voldemaras

former president of Carpatho-Ukraine, died in Butyrka in 1945

Avgustyn Voloshyn

German Wehrmacht general and last commandant of Berlin, died in custody in 1955

Helmuth Weidling

Lithuanian general, head of the Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisan forces after World War II, shot to death in 1953;^[3] later recognized as the fourth President of Lithuania in 2009

Jonas Žemaitis

(in Russian)

Official website

- interview on Radio Free Europe (in English)

Former Butyrka inmate says: "They throw you there to break you"

Article of the political prisoner's department of the Russian mypeople.ru

(in Russian)

Article of Rossiskaja Gaseta

(in Russian)

A list of prisons in Moscow

BBC report about Butyrka prison at Johnson's Russia list

(in Russian)

Unofficial website of workers of The Russian Federal Penitentiary Service