Publishing of Letter by Newspaper Called Unprecedented : Ex-Inmate Assails Soviet Labor Camps

The Literary Gazette, a newspaper with national distribution, has published a letter from a former prisoner complaining about conditions in Soviet labor camps.

The publication is believed to be without precedent in the Soviet Union. Diplomatic sources said they could think of no previous such incident.

Soviet officials have made public virtually no information about the country’s labor camps, estimated to hold as many as 1 million prisoners.

As an indictment of the prison camp system, the ex-prisoner’s letter hardly compares to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel “The Gulag Archipelago,” considered the classic treatment of the labor camps from the Lenin era to that of Nikita Khrushchev, and particularly under dictator Josef Stalin.

Even so, publication of the letter in the state-controlled media opened the Ministry of Internal Affairs--the much-feared MVD--to public criticism.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been campaigning for glasnost , or openness, in traditionally closed areas of Soviet society, and the Literary Gazette, a weekly, has been following his lead.

A commentator for the newspaper, referring to the issues raised in the ex-prisoner’s letter, said the public should know more about the subject. “It is high time to say what is going on in the corrective labor camps,” the commentator, Yuri Shchekochikhin, observed.

The letter, which appears in the current issue of the weekly newspaper, runs across the bottom of an inside page. V. Stavrovsky, writing about his experience in a labor camp in Smolensk, complained that there is no real system of training the inmates to enable them to return to a normal life after completing their sentences.

Police Harassment

“The development of vicious tendencies flourishes,” he said. “They call this a form of re-education, but it is really a continuation of a process in which one constantly feels suspicion and mistrust, either in himself or others. The so-called political and educational work is wretched.”

As a result, Stavrovsky continued, many prisoners serve two, three or even more terms in the camps.

Also, he said, the police harass ex-convicts and make it difficult for them to find a place in the community.

“They go right to the next term,” he said.

There was no indication of what offense Stavrovsky had committed, but he said he has had “several convictions.”

In his commentary, Shchekochikhin said it is a community concern if prisoners fail to adjust to normal life after serving their sentences.

The effectiveness of the correction system and the question of whether it encourages prisoners to lead a life of crime are proper subjects for discussion, Shchekochikhin said.

He called on the government to provide figures on how many prisoners return to a normal life and how many go back to prison as repeat offenders.

Shchekochikhin said some readers would probably be upset by publication of the letter, but he added, “The rule of glasnost does not tolerate exceptions.”