IT IS, perhaps, the ultimate hideaway for the reclusive Russian oligarch.

Forget the villa on Lake Como, the castle in Scotland or the private island in the Caribbean. Russia’s über-rich can now find a property with all the privacy and security they desire, right in the heart of Moscow: a prison built by the Empress Catherine the Great.

The Penitentiary Service is putting up for sale the 18thcentury Butyrskaya prison — one of the oldest and most notorious in Moscow — along with the 19th-century Kresty prison, in St Petersburg.

Agreed, comfort is hardly a selling point for the properties — and there is another catch: the purchasers must build new pre-trial detention facilities outside Moscow and St Petersburg.

Yuri Kalinin, the head of the service, announced the plan this week as part of a 54-billion rouble (£1.1 billion) programme to improve conditions in Russian prisons. He did not put a price on Butyrskaya, which occupies a three-hectare plot in central Moscow, but property experts estimated it at up to £160 million.

“We are ready to give it away if we can find a business partner willing to build a similar detention facility in the Moscow region,” Mr Kalinin said in an interview with the newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

The prison service also said that Kresty, a red-brick complex on the banks of the River Neva, would be sold and converted into a hotel and entertainment complex.

The proposed sales have been welcomed by groups campaigning for better conditions in Russian prisons, which house an estimated 830,000 people. But preservationists fear that the new owners will be allowed to redevelop the buildings radically, despite their status as protected historical buildings. Butyrskaya was built in 1771 as a barracks. Its first prisoner, in 1774, was Yemelyan Pugachev, leader of an uprising of peasants and Cossacks, in whose honour one of the prison towers is named.

Among its most famous inmates was Felix Dzerzhinsky, who was released after the February Revolution and went on to found the Soviet secret police. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize-winning author, also served time there. Its most prominent escapee was Harry Houdini, the American escapologist, who was chained and shackled, locked in a box and barred inside a cell in 1908. He took 28 minutes to slip out.

Butyrskaya’s last famous inmate was Vladimir Gusinsky, the media tycoon who spent three days there in 2000 until he agreed to sign over his business empire to Gazprom, the state gas monopoly.

Today, the prison has 2,726 inmates, with 40 of them often sharing a cell designed for 22.

Kresty is less well known than the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, where Fyodor Dostoyevsky was imprisoned. But when it was built in 1893, it was the largest solitary-confinement prison in Europe. And for almost a century it was a symbol of political repression, housing prominent dissidents such as Leon Trotsky. Today, it is renowned as Europe’s most overcrowded pre-trial detention facility. It achieved notoriety last year when prostitutes were found being smuggled in as guards.

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