Escape from “Kresty

**”**

In the summer of 1937, I was a very young man working at the Kirov Plant. One day a paint warehouse caught fire there. I wasn’t even nearby — that day I was supposed to work the night shift. But I never made it to work — they grabbed me almost at the factory gates and threw me into a “Black Maria.” They drove me somewhere and locked me in a cell without any explanation. In the morning, they called me in for interrogation.

From the investigator’s questions, I realized there was a denunciation against me, claiming I had planned the arson. I could already guess who had written it. There was a guy at the plant who kept pestering my girlfriend, and once after work I had given him a bit of a beating. Now he had decided to get revenge.

I denied everything. The investigator grew angry, especially since he had no real evidence against me. Suddenly his phone rang — apparently his superiors were summoning him. He told the guard:

“Take this son of a bitch to an empty cell. We’ll continue in an hour. Maybe by then his memory will return.”

The guard silently led me down the corridor, then along some stairs, unlocked a door, and shoved me into a cell. A man was sitting on the bunk inside, writing something. The barred window had been painted over with white paint, so I couldn’t see where it faced, but suddenly from outside came the long blast of a steamboat horn, followed by music drifting from a boat passing along the river. Then I realized I was most likely in Kresty Prison, which stands right on the bank of the Neva.

A wave of despair overwhelmed me. Just a few days earlier, my girlfriend and I had taken a boat excursion and sailed past that very place (perhaps even on the same boat whose horn I now heard). And now — who knew when I would ever leave… Such anguish seized me that my heart seemed to contract, and at that very moment I felt myself losing consciousness. Everything went dark before my eyes. Staggering, I instinctively threw up my hands to grab hold of something — and when my vision cleared, I found myself standing on the bank of the Neva, holding onto a parapet. And there, on the river, the very same little steamboat was moving toward the Liteyny Bridge.

I stood there like a fool, unable to understand anything. It felt as if someone had given me a powerful kick and thrown me out of the cell. For a long time, I just stood there, not believing my own eyes or sensations. When I finally looked around, I saw that I was indeed not far from Kresty, closer to the city center. It was early morning, and there were hardly any passersby. I shrugged and slowly began walking toward the center. No one stopped me or called out to me. I walked almost as far as the Peter and Paul Fortress before deciding to head home.

I had no money — everything in my pockets had been taken at the prison. I had to ride part of the way clinging onto the outside of a tram until a young female conductor took pity on me and allowed me to ride for free.

At home, I thought long and hard about what had happened and what to do next. My passport was still with the investigator. Then I remembered that I had automatically memorized his phone number when he told someone to call him at that number.

We didn’t have a phone at home, of course, so I went upstairs to my neighbor — the mother of one of the plant’s leading engineers. They had a separate apartment like ours, and they had a telephone.

When I heard the familiar voice answer, I gave my name and asked when my documents would be returned.

“Where are you calling from?” the investigator asked.

I explained.

“Do you know any poetry? Pushkin, Nekrasov… Read something — anything — and under no circumstances hang up. And don’t even think about running. We’ll find you anyway.”

This time a passenger car arrived — something like an “Emka,” but foreign-made. Besides the driver and the investigator, there was another man in plain clothes. When the investigator came inside for me, the other man stayed in the car.

“How did you escape?” he asked.

I said I hadn’t escaped and told him everything that had happened.

“I know,” the investigator said. “Your cellmate confirmed that you entered his cell and immediately disappeared.”

On the stairway, he stopped me and said:

“Here’s the thing, kid. It seems you’re clean in this case, since you called me instead of making a run for it. I can’t lock you up — what if you pull that stunt again? But I can’t just let you go either, since you’re involved in the case. You’re lucky I hadn’t processed you yet. So let the learned men deal with you. Just remember — not a word about what happened. Answer only what you’re asked, and you’ll be free sooner.”

And straight from home, they took me… to a psychiatric hospital. Indeed, no one asked me about the incident there, but they kept me almost a week anyway. During that time, they found the real arsonist — the very man who had denounced me. The investigator had decided to look into him and discovered that he had been selling the paint on the side and delivering barrels of water to the plant instead.

That was the only such incident in my life; nothing like it ever happened again. But during the war, I heard of a very similar case: a young recruit disappeared from a dugout during an artillery bombardment, right before his comrades’ eyes — and later it turned out he had ended up that same day at home in Tashkent.

I’ve told this story to several scientists, but it seems none of them believed me. I would like to know whether there are other reliable cases like this, and how they might be explained.