1884 and continued until 1890. It was performed by the inmates of the prison who were kept on the site: a part of the old prison was demolished, then the detainees built the new one while continuing to live in the remaining parts of the old building. Then the prisoners were moved to the new building, the remains of the old building were demolished and construction continued. The prison was one of the first buildings in Russia that used electric lighting, effective ventilation and central heating. In the center of one of the cross-shaped buildings Tomishko installed a monument to English philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard. By the time it was built it was considered the most advanced prison in the world. It was the largest prison in Europe. According to an urban legend, Tomishko was so proud of his creation that he reported to Tsar Alexander III: "Your Majesty, I have built the prison for you"; "No, you have built it for yourself", supposedly answered the Tsar. The legend continues that besides the 999 official prison cells there is a secret cell number 1000 that still holds the dead body of Tomishko, while his ghost haunts the prison. The legend is almost certainly false. There are only 960 cells in the prison. Prison in Imperial Russia In Imperial Russia the prison was officially called Saint Petersburg Prison for Solitary Confinement. It was used for the detention of both common criminals and political prisoners. 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 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. On the evening of , during the February Revolution, rebellious soldiers and workers who came to a meeting near the Finlyandsky Rail Terminal were led by Mikhail Kalinin to storm Kresty. They stormed the prison from both sides, freed the inmates, and burnt all the prison paperwork in the courtyard. The prime objectives of the Bolsheviks were: 1. To destroy the police records of Bolshevik comrades 2. To deliberately emulate the Storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. In releasing all the