Clock Tower

The Clock Tower is one of four corner towers of the Butyrka prison fortress on Novoslobodskaya Street, built in the late 18th century to a design by Matvei Kazakov. The complex, known today as Butyrka Prison, is Moscow’s oldest and most famous place of detention, protected by the state as a historical and architectural monument. Along with its three neighboring towers — Pugachevskaya, Politseyskaya, and Severnaya — the Clock Tower has borne witness to the history of Russia’s penitentiary system for almost two and a half centuries.

In 1784, Catherine the Great ordered that the dilapidated wooden stockade near the Butyrskaya Zastava be replaced with a brick provincial building for holding prisoners, and informed Moscow’s Governor-General Zakhar Grigoryevich Chernyshev of the decision. The project was entrusted to Kazakov, who proposed a quadrangular plan with a square tower at each corner; the cell blocks inside were arranged in a cross shape, and the Church of the Intercession was built in the center of the courtyard in 1782 to the same design. The southern corner tower was later named Pugachevskaya — in its basement, in January 1775, the shackled Yemelyan Pugachev was held before his execution.

The towers and walls are built of red brick in the spirit of castle architecture with pointed openings, echoing European Romanticism of the late 18th century. Each tower functioned as a separate prison section. A reconstruction of the complex led by architect Alexander Shimanovsky in the 1870s dismantled part of the buildings surrounding the towers and added the Alexander Nevsky church; of the four towers, Pugachevskaya has retained its original appearance most fully, while the Clock Tower ended up embedded within later lines of construction in the prison yard.

According to documents sent by the Moscow governor to the prison authorities, in the spring of 1882 two political prisoners were held specifically in the Clock Tower — the Pugachevskaya held nine people, the Politseyskaya five, and the Severnaya sixteen. The prison was visited by Leo Tolstoy, who was gathering material for his novel “Resurrection”; in the early 20th century it also held Ivan Kalyayev, sailors from the cruiser Ochakov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and in 1917 Felix Dzerzhinsky was freed from it. In 1908, the illusionist Harry Houdini escaped a prison transport crate in 28 minutes before the eyes of the inmates.

After the 1917 revolution, Butyrka retained its functions as a facility for investigation and transit of prisoners, and during the Great Terror of 1937–1938 thousands of repressed people passed through its cells. Death sentences were carried out here until 1996. A museum has operated at the prison since 1971, open only to organized tours booked by a legal entity; Butyrka itself still functions as a pre-trial detention center of the Federal Penitentiary Service (GUFSIN).

The Clock Tower remains part of an active restricted facility, but as an element of Kazakov’s late-18th-century ensemble it is recognized as an architectural monument of federal significance. Its walls remember not only criminal and political prisoners of different eras but also visits by outstanding contemporaries — from Tolstoy to Houdini — which makes the Butyrka fortress one of the most historically rich places in old Moscow.