The KGB pre-trial detention center of Belarus is an investigative jail located in the inner courtyard of the KGB building 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 organs expanded and, before the war, occupied an entire block in the very center of Minsk. Most of those arrested were kept in the city prison. However, in the courtyard of the former Zemlyarobche (Agricultural Society) building the chekists constructed a new prison. The prison 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 "Amerikanka". 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 "Amerikanka". They were accused of nationalist conspiracy against the Soviet state.
Regarding how the investigators of "Amerikanka" "worked", a former Soviet security official, Iosif Yatschenia, described events in his diary. 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 "conveyor": 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 "conveyor", 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, Boris Tsypkin, arrested and imprisoned in "Amerikanka", jumped from the upper tier into the dark prison shaft but did not perish, 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 Kulyashov and Kuntsevich beat the arrested Yakov Sheleg so badly that he died on the spot. Similarly, during the investigation, arrested I. Shaban, M. Avechka and others were killed. Many of the tortured died later in hospitals. According to documents, on the orders of Alexander Gepstein, the acting head of the 3rd department of the KGB of the BSSR, the bodies of the killed were deliberately not examined in order to hide the true causes of death.
During the "Great Terror" in the night of October 29-30, 1937, 52 figures of Belarusian culture and science were executed in the basement of the building, accused of anti-Soviet activity. Until 1953, the building, along with the Pishchalovsky Castle, was one of the places of execution of death sentences. The bloody conveyor of death in "Amerikanka" continued later as well.
Since 1991, the prison has been used by the Committee for State Security of the Republic of Belarus.
Through the KGB pre-trial detention center since 2020, dozens of those imprisoned in high-profile political cases have passed. Those held included figures in such high-profile cases as the "Belgasprombank case", the "arson of Gaidukevich's dacha case", the "Workers' Movement case", the "conspiracy case", cases of "state treason" and others.