A cell with a view.

This time last year I was in a KGB Prison.

I was only visiting, but Christ what a disturbing place it was. Paterei, or ‘Battery’ prison only closed in 2004 but it looked as though it had been abandoned for thirty years or more. To add to the odd feeling of dereliction, half of the building had been subtly altered by art students who held an exhibition here the year before, using only what they could find on site and many of the exhibits have been left intact to moulder lightly.

The result is you’re not sure what’s been left alone and what’s been altered, aside from the crudely printed jokes in English and Estonian sellotaped to the walls on thin strips of paper and a roomful of smashed typewriters, telephones and fax machines pouring out of a doorway. An odd mix of humour and despair pervaded the vaulted hallways.

AFTER wandering into what I thought might actually be a building site but was actually Tallinn’s newest mostly open and partly renovated tourist attraction, sited next to Tallinn’s other newest but partly open and mostly renovated attraction – the seaplane port, with the added bonus of a wild variety of land-bound boats from the last century - I paid 2 euros to look around receiving a ticket that still have the old Kroon price printed on it, which surprised me, as the currency chance had taken place two years before. As I entered the prison compound a man of about 60 fired up a pneumatic drill and began to demolish a decade old wall around a far older guard tower. Rubble sat everywhere around the outer walls of the main block, mixed with wooden planks and, of all things, a damp, sagging music stage from a gig the night before.

The prison was built in the 1820’s by the Russian Tsar Nicholas I (not personally), as a fortress to defend his stolen city from sea attack. A hundred years later, after a brief flowering of freedom, the Russians were back and it became the notorious KGB prison I was now walking around with a bottle of water, a ham sandwich and a little trepidation.
It was far bigger than the prison block I’d seen in Vilnius, but it had the same grim exercise yard, surrounded by towers and walls. 

An exercise space was about six feet square with a small bench in the middle, grey concrete walls around and open only nine feet above to the elements and a scrap of blue sky. Twelve or so of these cells ran in two lines in the middle of the prison yard, surrounded by a tall fortified wall covered in rusted razor wire and lookout points. Today it’s covered with man-high unkempt grasses and weeds, but when the prison was open for business I doubt these poor inmates ever saw a wisp of green.

Back in the main building the cells seem large, but I know from experience that there would have often have been up to thirty or more in a space about the size of a single-decker bus. In the corner by the door was a single, smashed-up squat toilet. The air was cold and damp. In several rooms bare metal bed frames or bunk beds lined one or two walls, or a smashed filing cabinet and a dozen old Bakelite telephones littered the floor. In one some scraps of newspapers and magazines had been stuck to a wall. Breasts and pretty faces.

Only two thirds of the bulbs appeared to be working in the corridors and rooms that I wandered through, which created terrifying pitch-black spaces all around the prison despite it being a bright summer’s day outside. What it must have been like to be forced to live in such a cave of a place for years on end. 

Needless to say I didn’t linger in the darker parts in case I got lost and became a permanent feature. Parts of the building looked close to falling down at a moment’s notice.

Across from the main entrance to the cells, past the exercise yard, I found what would have been the most petrifying part of the prison for the inmates – the execution room.

First, a heavy metal door opens into a tiny holding cell, which leads to a long narrow corridor, to a semi-subterranean windowless cellar of a room, the centre of which holds the focus of both the room and your attention. A noose.

You could almost smell the residual fear of long dead inmates in the four foot wide corridor; hear the whispered cries for mercy bouncing around the peeling plasterwork in the execution room. I hurried out into daylight and took in great gulps of air. I’d been in the prison for more than two hours, fascinated and horrified, gawping at the medical room, guard’s library, endless cells, solitary confinement block, staff offices and the grim accoutrements of Russian prison life: it was time to leave. It was time for a beer.

As I passed the entrance to the main prison block towards the exit gate, I heard an odd sound. It was a baby crying. I followed the sound and found a young baby in a pram, shaded from the bright sunlight under a shallow archway. Clearly the parents couldn’t get the cumbersome pram up the few steps into the main building, or up to the second and third floors, so had left their child here while they looked round. For some reason I still can’t quite decipher properly, I found this juxtaposition the most chilling of my visit. I returned to the old town of Tallinn and downed a few beers, thankful I was only visiting.

A week later I would walk into another KGB prison in Latvia. I never learn.

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