No one familiar with the travails of the victims of tsarist and Soviet oppression will have forgotten the name of perhaps the most notorious political prison outside of Moscow, Vladimir Central, through whose cells passed thousands of prisoners on their way to exile, the GULAG and all too often death.
Among those who passed through its gates were émigré Vasily Shulgin, Ukrainian Greek Catholic leader Kliment Sheptytsky (who died there), pre-1940 Lithuanian Prime Minister Antas Merkis and his family, and even Stalin’s son Vasily, the New Chronicle of Current Events reports (ixtc.org/2017/01/vozvraschenie-vladimirskogo-polittsentrala/#more-12787).