At first glance it looked just as anyone might expect a top security prison to look: a high wall, barbed wire, bare exercise yard and small stuffy cells. But something had happened to the Lenin Room.


In former years, prisons, like any other Soviet institution, were always provided with a special room for political education -- the Lenin Room, decked with Politburo members' portraits, posters and Communist Party slogans.


Over the last few years, these rooms have been lying empty and deserted, the portraits gathering dust.


Until last month, that is, when under an agreement signed between the Interior Ministry and the Orthodox Church, priests gained regular access to penitentiaries. And in many prisons, including Moscow's Prison No. 5, inmates have taken over the Lenin rooms and converted them into places of worship, officially consecrated by visiting priests.


"For us any faith is good as long it calls on people to refrain from committing crimes," said Valery Irigov, a spokesman for the penitentiary system of the Interior Ministry. "No major religion recommends crime."


According to Irigov almost 250 churches or praying rooms have been already built in prisons and camps of the ministry.


"The Church has come to help us with its moral authority," said Yevgeny Parfyonov, chief of Prison No. 5. "For us it is extremely important that people now are able to go to church. Maybe some of them will never think about it. But we must give them the opportunity. We want to use everything to help people to find the right way in life."


Parfyonov said services are held twice a week and all religious rites are allowed.


"A prisoner can even have a church wedding here," he said.


Vladimir Klimenko, deputy chief of the prison in charge of correctional work, said that discipline improves among prisoners who go to church and communicate with priests.


"Administrative efforts are not enough to keep prisoners calm," he said, adding that religious activity "gives them the opportunity to start thinking seriously about their past and future."


Klimenko also said that faith has turned out to be much more effective than the communist ideology which used to be forced on the prisoners in the Soviet era.


"I know people hated our endless political classes where they had to study Marx or listen to the general secretaries' speeches. Now nobody forces them. Here a person has very few opportunities to choose. But in this case they have a choice like all people outside. They appreciate it," he said


Klimenko also added that the great majority of people in the prison are Russians -- that is potentially of the Russian Orthodox faith -- but if prisoners of other religions or denominations wanted to perform their religious rites, the prison authorities would welcome it.


"Of course we can't built a church for every denomination, but we can allow them to keep religious items in their cells."


Father Alexander, a priest who holds services in the prison said he didn't see anything strange about the fact that in some places churches were being built in former Lenin rooms.


"Satan has gone, real faith will stay," he said.


Vladimir 22,, a prisoner who is serving a five-year sentence for robbery, said that the church was very important to prisoners and that even non-believers came to the church to listen to the priest.


"My life changed when I started to communicate with the priest. It was not as dull as it used to be. Here people have a lot of time to think about their life -- and many prisoners begin to believe in God," he said.