The reconstruction of the wine warehouse was developed by Vladislav Lvov, the chairman of the Saint Petersburg Prison Committee.

He was the designer of the Model Uyezd Prison originally built in Staraya Russa and reproduced in Vesyegonsk, Vyazma, Tsaritsyn and other places.

He appreciated the Philadelphia system that recommended building prisons in the shape of a star with many rays coming from a single observation point.

The shape of the buildings allowed observation of all the corridors from a single point and also had religious significance, encouraging penance among the inmates.

The crosses were joined together by a massive five onion domed red brick Russian Revival church on top of an administrative building.

In the center of one of the cross-shaped buildings Tomishko installed a monument to English philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard.

Among the inmates were: the future Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky, the founder of the Constitutional Democratic party Pavel Milyukov, the prominent Bolshevik revolutionaries Leon Trotsky[4] and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, and the future first Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky.

In 1906 all 200 deputies of the first State Duma of the Russian Empire who had signed the Vyborg Manifesto had to spend three months in Kresty Prison.

In the poem she writes: And if once, whenever in my native land,They'd think of the raising up my monument,I give my permission for such good a feast,But with one condition – they have to place itNot near the sea, where I once have been born –All my warm connections with it had been torn,Not in the tsar’s garden near that tree-stump, blessed,Where I am looked for by the doleful shade,But here, where three hundred long hours I stood forAnd where was not opened for me the hard door.Her wish was fulfilled half a century after her death.

[2] During the Siege of Leningrad most detainees were either conscripted into the penal military units of the Soviet Army or transferred to the Eastern regions of Russia.

[3] In April 1995 the monument To the victims of Political repressions made by Mikhail Shemyakin was installed on the embankment across the Neva River from the prison.

It depicts two bronze sphinxes with pretty women's faces as seen from the residential houses on the embankment and bare skulls as seen from the prison's side of the river.

On the granite base of the monument there are inscriptions with quotes from Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Zabolotsky, Daniil Andreyev, Dmitry Likhachev, Joseph Brodsky, Yuri Galanskov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Vysotsky and Vladimir Bukovsky.

[2] In December 2006 a monument to poet Anna Akhmatova by Galina Dodonova was erected across the Neva River opposite the prison[6] according to her will in her poem Requiem.

[2] In summer 2006 Vladimir Putin (President of Russia) announced that the prison would be relocated to a new facility in the Kolpinsky District on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg.

[9] It is built like a small town, containing all the necessary infrastructure: residential quarters, religious buildings, sports facilities, a hospital, workshops, and a hotel for relatives and visitors.