The KGB Remand Center is a pre-trial detention facility located in the inner courtyard of the KGB headquarters in Minsk. It is intended to hold individuals whose activities are considered a threat to the national security of the Republic of Belarus.
Over time, the apparatus of the Soviet punitive agencies grew to occupy an entire block in the center of Minsk before the war. Most of those arrested were kept in the city prison. However, in the courtyard of the former Agricultural Society building, the Chekists constructed a new jail. It was built in a circular form, divided into 18 chamber-sectors with a guard post at the center. Interrogation rooms were located on the semi-basement level. The new building resembled prisons common in the United States, which may be why it acquired the informal name Amerykanka. The conditions of detention there were quite severe. Even today, most cells lack sanitation facilities.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, kulaks, “anti-Soviet elements,” Belarusian scientists and writers passed through Amerykanka. They were accused of a nationalist conspiracy against the Soviet state.
A former Soviet security official named Iosif Yatschenia described in his diary how the investigators of Amerykanka “worked.” He himself became a victim of repressions in 1937. He wrote that people were tortured by hunger, endless beatings, and threats of execution. Among the favorite methods of interrogators was the so-called “treadmill”: for several days without food and water, detainees were forced to stand in a military stance, during which interrogators conducted interrogations, replacing one another. During the “treadmill,” people’s hands and feet would swell, they could not walk, and due to lack of sleep, hallucinations occurred. Some could not endure and tried to commit suicide. For example, in 1934, a Minsk physician and orthopedist, Barys Tsypkin, who was arrested and imprisoned in Amerykanka, jumped from the upper tier into the dark prison shaft but did not die; he only damaged his spine. It is likely that after this incident the prison shaft was covered with a grate.
Many people died during inhumane interrogations. It is known, for example, that NKVD investigators Kuliashou and Kuntsevich beat the arrested Yakau Sheleh so badly that he died on the spot. Similarly, during the investigation, arrestees I. Shaban, M. Avechka and others were killed. Many of the tortured died later in hospitals. According to documents, on the orders of Aleksandr Gepstein, the acting head of the 3rd department of the State Security Administration under the BSSR NKVD, the bodies of the killed were deliberately not examined to hide the true causes of death.
During the Great Purge, on the night of 29–30 October 1937, 52 prominent figures in Belarusian culture and science were executed in the basement of a building. They were accused of anti-Soviet activity. Until 1953, the building, along with Piščalaŭski Castle, was one of the places where death sentences were carried out. The bloody conveyor of death in Amerykanka continued later as well.
Since 1991, the prison has been used by the Committee for State Security of Belarus.
After the 2020 uprising, dozens of individuals imprisoned in high-profile political cases have passed through the KGB Remand Center. Among those held were individuals involved in cases such as the “Belgasprombank case,” the “arson of Aleh Haidukevich’s dacha case,” the “Workers’ Movement case,” the “conspiracy case,” and cases of “high treason,” among others.