Inside Estonia’s KGB Prison

One of the coolest parts of Tallinn was getting to see both sides of how the KGB operated in Soviet Estonia.

The day before, I toured the KGB Museum inside Hotel Viru. The hotel opened during Soviet times and was used heavily by foreign visitors, which naturally meant the KGB wanted to know what everyone was talking about.

They had listening devices hidden throughout the hotel and operated out of a secret area on the 23rd floor. Basically, if you were someone the Soviets were interested in, there was a decent chance someone was listening.

The next day I walked over to Pagari Street to see what happened when the KGB didn’t like what they heard.

Slightly darker.

Pagari 1 looks like a normal building in Tallinn’s Old Town, and that’s because it originally was. It was built in 1912 as a residential and commercial building. During the Soviet occupation, though, it became the headquarters of the NKVD and later the KGB in Estonia.

Down in the basement were the prison cells.

People suspected of being political enemies were brought here, interrogated, tortured, and held before eventually being sentenced or transferred elsewhere. Some prisoners spent months down there, dealing with nighttime interrogations and pretty terrible conditions.

You can actually walk through the original basement cells today.

That was probably the craziest part for me. It’s one thing to read about Soviet occupation in a museum. It’s another to stand inside the actual rooms where it happened.

There are stories throughout the cells about the people who were imprisoned there and what they did to survive. Some prisoners even learned Morse code so they could secretly communicate between cells.

Seeing the Hotel Viru one day and the prison the next made the whole thing even more interesting.

One building showed how the KGB watched people.

The other showed what could happen after they were done watching.

Pretty dark stuff, but easily one of the most interesting things I did in Estonia.