Soviets Moving to Rehabilitate Victims of Repression : Legislation: Names of the dead would be cleared, and compensation would be paid to those still living.

The Soviet legislature on Monday passed in principle a bill to rehabilitate and give financial compensation to millions of victims of political repression under dictator Josef Stalin and other Soviet leaders.

The Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, voted 316 to 13, with 25 abstentions, in favor of the bill, which establishes a procedure for officially clearing the names of those who were killed and imprisoned for political reasons from 1920 to 1988 and making financial restitution to those still living. The bill will be worked on by committees of the Soviet legislature and submitted for a final vote next fall.

“The rehabilitation of victims of political repression is linked to efforts to overcome vestiges of the past,” said Andrei Y. Sebentsov, a member of the legislature’s Committee for Legislation and Legal Affairs, “and the need to purge our consciences and think over our history.”

The adoption of this bill will demonstrate “the desire to give up terrorist methods of governing society, to restore justice with respect to innocent sufferers and to guarantee future legality in the state on the basis of human rights acknowledged by the world community,” the official Tass news agency quoted Sebentsov as saying.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev last year issued a sweeping decree denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era and calling for the restoration of civil rights to all living victims.

Monday’s measure goes further because it includes political repressions that occurred under all Soviet leaders, including V. I. Lenin and Gorbachev.

Political articles of the criminal code have been “null and void” since 1989, Sebentsov said.

According to the bill, people who were “repressed without guilt,” or their surviving relatives, will be issued official certificates that will serve as legal documents establishing their eligibility to have their rights restored and be financially compensated.

The state expects to spend an annual 1.5 billion rubles, $3.4 billion at the inflated official exchange rate, to compensate people who were imprisoned on political charges. Victims will receive 80 rubles, or about a fourth of the average monthly salary, for each month they spent in captivity.

“This is a very fair law,” said Mikhail Y. Kovalenko, a lawyer and an activist of Memorial, a society that fights for justice for victims of Stalin’s purges. “But unfortunately it was a very long struggle, and there are very few victims still alive.”

Roy A. Medvedev, a prominent historian of the Stalinist era and a national lawmaker, said that only about 100,000 victims of Stalinist and post-Stalinist repression are still alive.

The head of the KGB security policy, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, said last month that 4.2 million people were victims of political purges in the Soviet Union between 1920 and 1953, during a time when Lenin and then Stalin were the country’s leaders. Of these, about 1.2 million people were rehabilitated between 1988 and October, 1990, Kryuchkov said.

The KGB chief did not indicate how many of those who had been repressed were killed. The designation applies to people killed, imprisoned and exiled for political reasons.

Soviet historians, however, have estimated that as many as 40 million people were killed, arrested, forced from their homeland or blacklisted under Stalin alone.