The Tower of Death

In the Sverdlovsk district of the city of Perm, on Komsomolsky Prospekt, there is a building about which Perm people know many legends and pass them on to each other.Popular rumor calls the building the Tower of Death. The name has become commonplace to such an extent that the name also used in official papers.

Construction and purpose of the building

The building, built in 1952 by the architect Pereleshin, was conceived as the main building of the Perm University , but the State Security Committee became the owner, later – the Perm Territory Department of Internal Affairs.

The brick plastered building built in the style of monumental classicism. With a height of five floors, the rectangular building occupies a quarter and has a three-tiered tower with a spire 43 meters high. This is a symbol of Perm, where the internal affairs bodies were constantly working.

City’s legends

The ATC building is a source of legends. It built at the end of Stalin’s reign, but in the stories about the tower, history pushed back into the past and associated with years of terror and repression.

Rumor claims:

• Here were Stalin’s torture chambers.
• The bodies of its builders, GULAG prisoners who brought to Perm for work, immured in the house.
• There an underground prison connected by secret passages with the Yegoshikhinsky cemetery.
• NKVD officers tortured and executed innocent people.
• Convicts thrown from the tower, shot and buried in the courtyard.
• One communist prisoner threw himself from the tower down.
• In the building, the muffled sounds of shots were regularly heard – prisoners were shot.
• They tell romantic stories about unhappy love, when unhappy lovers took their own lives here.
• Even today it is scary in the tower, the shadows of the victims roam there.

Causes of legends

The name “Tower of Death” firmly entrenched in the language of the townspeople, and for good reason.

1. A new high-rise building on a vacant lot towered over the low-rise city like a medieval tower. Standing out sharply, the building become an important landmark in the urban space and is often mentioned in communication.
2. The persistence of these stories explained by the negative attitude of people towards “organs”. People used to consider them a source of arbitrariness and an apparatus of violence against the people.
3. The townspeople explain the ominous nature of the tower by the fact that it built on a cursed place: in a cemetery, where people used to be shot.
4. In 1963, the film “The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors” released, which had an extraordinary success with the audience. The main reality of the kingdom is the tower of death. Perhaps this film gave rise to the emergence of the Perm toponym.
5. The version indirectly confirms by the fact that there a cinema on the site of the NKVD office, the last film that appeared on the screen before the demolition called “The Tower of Death”.
6. On the ground floor of the ATC building there is a laboratory where experts fired at the seized weapons . The inhabitants passing by, hearing the shots, thought that the arrested shot without trial. This gave rise to rumors, and the name of the tower exactly the case when legends created before our eyes.

The building of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Perm Territory is an object of cultural heritage, a monument of architecture and urban planning.