Trubetskoy Bastion Prison

The Trubetskoy in the prison’s name is Prince Yury Yuryevich Trubetskoy, an associate of Peter the Great. In seventeen oh three, he oversaw the construction of the earthen bastion that received his surname. The prison building itself appeared almost one hundred seventy years later, in eighteen seventy-two, and inherited the bastion’s name. Prince Trubetskoy was not a prisoner there.

At the end of January eighteen ninety-seven, twenty-seven-year-old Maria Vetrova was brought here. She grew up in an orphanage, graduated from a gymnasium, and spent several years earning her living as a teacher in small towns. She came to St Petersburg to study at the Higher Courses for Women—then one of the few opportunities for a woman to receive an education under a university program. At the same time, Vetrova taught at a Sunday school for workers.

She was arrested in connection with the Lakhta Printing House. In the settlement of Lakhta, a revolutionary circle printed banned brochures and proclamations. Vetrova belonged to the Narodovoltsy Group—an organization that continued the tradition of the defeated People’s Will—and knew some members of the underground. Investigators needed names and connections. She denied any involvement and named no one. No longer only her studies or future profession were at stake: testimony could bring other people here.

This pentagonal building was built precisely for investigations of this kind. Normally, no verdict had yet been passed here. The suspect was separated from accomplices and the outside world, kept under constant observation, and interrogated while the police reconstructed the whole chain of acquaintances. After renovations, sixty-nine solitary cells remained in the prison. One person stood behind each door; through a special opening in it, the duty officer watched the cell.

Vetrova was first placed in the third cell, then transferred to the seventh, on the second floor. The exact reason for her act remains unknown: Vetrova’s own explanation has not survived. Her complaints about the humiliating treatment by gendarmes and her severe emotional state are known. One evening in early February, she took kerosene from the lamp provided to light the cell and set fire to the clothes she was wearing.

Vetrova lived for four more days and died in the prison hospital. No autopsy was performed, and the funeral was arranged in secret. When the news nevertheless got beyond the fortress walls, her comrades interpreted her death as a consequence of the solitary-confinement regime and pressure during the investigation. At the beginning of March, several thousand students and women students came to Kazan Cathedral for a memorial service. The priest refused to perform it; those gathered sang “Eternal Memory” themselves. The police surrounded them at the exit, recorded the names of about one thousand two hundred people, and detained some of them. Such gatherings in Vetrova’s memory then continued for several years.

Today, the cells, corridors, and walls of the building form part of the museum exhibition. The furnishings have been restored according to different periods; the furniture and prison utensils in the cells are reconstructions. What remains authentic is the very arrangement of isolation: the second floor, a row of identical doors, and the site of the seventh cell, where the act of one former teacher first made what was happening inside Trubetskoy Bastion known to all of St Petersburg.