Kresty Prison
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| Location | Saint Petersburg, Russia |
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| Coordinates | 59°57′13″N 30°21′52″E / 59.9537°N 30.3644°E |
| Status | operational |
| Security class | detention center |
| Capacity | 1,150 |
| Opened | 1730s |
| Managed by | Saint Petersburg Prison Committee |
Kresty (Russian: Кресты, literally Crosses) prison, officially Investigative Isolator No. 1 of the Administration of the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishments for the city of Saint Petersburg (Следственный Изолятор № 1 УФСИН по г. Санкт-Петербургу) is a detention center in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The prison consists of two cross-shaped buildings (hence the name) and the Orthodox Church of St. Alexander Nevsky. The prison has 960 cells and was originally designed for 1150 detainees. It is slated to be closed after the construction of a modern prison facility (also in the shape of a cross).
The history of the prison starts in the 1730s. During the reign of Anna Ioannovna, Vinny Gorodok (Wine Town) was a warehouse complex where all the wine for the city of Saint Petersburg was held. After the Emancipation reform of 1861 the need for prison space greatly increased; before the reforms, serfs were incarcerated by their landowners and after the reforms they were put in state prisons. Thus, in 1867 the wine warehouse was transformed into a 700-bed prison separated into female and male areas. The reconstruction of the wine warehouse was developed by Vladislav Lvov, the chairman of the Saint Petersburg Prison Committee.
In 20 years the prison became too small for the city. The project for the new city prison was developed by Antony Tomishko, a citizen of Austria-Hungary, a member of the Russian Academy of Arts and a staff architect of the Russian State Prison Administration. He was the designer of the Model Uyezd Prison originally built in Staraya Russa and reproduced in Vesyegonsk, Vyazma, Tsaritsyn and other places. Tomishko studied the organization of prisons in Germany and was impressed by the Moabit prison, with three blocks joining a single one tower. He also appreciated the Philadelphia system that recommended building prisons in the shape of a star with many rays coming from a single observation point. The system was also known as the Panopticon system.
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