WORLD'S WORST PRISON

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21716, 3 February 1934, Page 3 (Supplement)

WORLD'S WORST PRISON

MOSCOW " BASTILE " BURNED CONVICTS AND GUARDS PERISH / ' ALLEGED WILFUL ORIGIN The world's worst prison—Lubyanka, in Moscow, headquarters of the dreaded Ogpu—was destroyed by fire in December. Twenty prisoners and their guards wer<i trapped in underground catacombs four floors below the street level. They were all suffocated or burned to death said the Sunday Express correspondent in Berlin. It was alleged that Ogpu officials, fearful of . revelations against themselves for taking bribes, set fire to the first' floor containing all the documents. The result was that the whole interior of the building has been destroved. Many arrests were made. "News' of the fire was, not allowed to be circulated in Russia. were ordered not to mention it, all press telegrams were censored, and no newspaper telephone calls were allowed from abroad. But details leaked over the border to Warsaw on December 16, and after being officially confirmed the full'story was broadcast by the Polish Government wireless station in Warsaw. The Soviet bastille was a grim, secret city of underground prisons and soundproof execution vaults, of law courts and spacious apartments, clubs and cantefens for the Ogpu officials, who work, sleep and live there. The fire, Warsaw states, raged fiercest in the central building of the block, which has eight storeys above ground and four below. Several explosions occurred when the large stock of ammunition in a lower floor caught fire. The entire area surrounding the prison was cordoned off by large detachments of Russian soldiers, so that no one would know that the dreaded prison had been burned. The correspondent says: " The Lubyanka has the reputation of being the most tragic building in the world. Countless thousands have been condemned by its court, shot in its soundproof subterranean execution rooms, and carried away by its death lorries. On one night aloWe in 1917, 2000 aristocrats were shot in the courtyard." It was in the Lubyanka that tho Vickers engineers were imprisoned.