Matrosskaia tishina

[Jack Kollmann]

>Steven Hill wrote:
>  Now, a new query, about crooks, crime, jails, prisons,
>"camps," etc. In some of the literature I'm reading this summer,
>I encounter references to "silence for sailors," if I take literally
>that expression.  But clearly it refers to a notorious JAIL or
>PRISON called "Matrosskaia tishina."
>
>Does anyone out there have some explanation, how a notorious
>penal institution acquired such a curious name?

         Matrosskaia tishina is the name of a street in Moscow NE of center 
in the Sokol'niki District; there is also the Matrosskii Bridge over the 
IAuza River (Ulitsa Stromynka).  Peter I started a sailboat workshop on the 
right bank of the IAuza, around which grew a sailors' (and shipbuilders') 
district, and where a hospital was founded during Peter's time in a "quiet" 
(tikhii) meadow that came to be known as the Matrosskaia tishina 
hospital.  A psychiatric hospital ( #3 in Soviet times, now the V.A. 
Giliarovskii Psychiatric Hospital) is located at No. 20, perhaps at the 
same location as the Petrine hospital(?).  Numbers 4-20 on Ulitsa 
Matrosskaia tishina include, in addition to the psychiatric hospital at 
#20, the Matrosskaia Tishina Prison and the Matrosskaia Tishina Psychiatric 
Prison IZ-48/1.
         I'm not familiar with the history of this complex of prisons and 
psychiatric hospitals/prisons or how notorious they were.  Perhaps someone 
else will know more about their 19th-20th-century history.  They are 
mentioned in Avraham Shifrin's "The First Guidebook to Prisons and 
Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union,"  Stephanus Edition, 
Uhldingen/Seewis, Switzerland,1980, transl. from Russian, pp.  24, 25, 40, 
47, 50.

Jack Kollmann
Stanford University

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