Off to Siberia? No Longer in New Russia

Russian legislators, making a historic update to the criminal code, Thursday revoked the law that let czars and Communists alike sentence many of Russia’s illustrious sons and daughters--from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Soviet-era dissidents--to Siberian exile or banishment.

“This is especially pleasant for me because if events had developed otherwise, I would still have been imprisoned in exile,” said Lev Timofeyev, a Moscow human rights activist released in 1987. “Thank God, all my friends are free.”

Humanizing the criminal code, the Supreme Soviet abolished four types of punishment often used in Russia for cruel ends: exile within the country, banishment from cities like Moscow, forced labor in lieu of incarceration and parole conditioned on fulfilling mandatory, often backbreaking or hazardous jobs.

Asked why, Interior Minister Viktor F. Yerin replied, “Because this is outdated practice.”

“We must look real facts in the face,” he told reporters.

“If a person has served his sentence or part of his sentence and has demonstrated that he has repented and is going to reform, and has drawn conclusions, let us release him and let him go back home and take up a job without the intermediate stage of exile, of living in the backwoods,” Yerin said.

“It is hard on his family, his wife and his children often to go to the place of exile to join him. Who needs all this?”

Traditionally, the answer was simple--Russian authorities.

Many of the czar’s subjects, and then uncounted numbers of citizens of the Soviet Union, were sent eastward to Siberia or the frigid northern climes of Komi or other wilderness regions as exiles after release from prison.

In the Stalin-era gulag system and later, convicts by the hundreds of thousands were also forced to work in harsh conditions at menial, extremely hazardous jobs, from uranium- or lead-mining to tree felling in the frozen region.

To Russians, the system became known as khimia , or “chemistry,” since chemical plants producing deadly substances like industrial poisons traditionally employed armies of these hapless, unprotected parolees.

Ironically, the lawmakers’ decision ending khimia and the other practices including banishment, or not allowing convicts to reside in certain areas after their release, comes as Russia is being overrun by a crime wave of such scale that President Boris N. Yeltsin has called it the No. 1 threat to the interests of the state.

Conscious of the new dangers posed by crime in a liberalized society, the Supreme Soviet also toughened punishment for attempted escapes from prisons and detention centers from three to five additional years of confinement.

If convicts plot their escape, use firearms, dig a tunnel or attempt several escapes, they can get up to an eight-year term.

Punishment for hostage-taking was also toughened.

According to the Itar-Tass news agency, the 1,092 people still in exile in frequently isolated, impoverished locales throughout Russia will be allowed to return home over the next three months.

They will be the last in a long line of legal pariahs.

These have included many of the “Decembrists” (Russian military officers who tried to overthrow the autocracy in 1825) and Dostoevsky, author of “Crime and Punishment,” who was condemned to die in 1849 for his radical views but then received a reprieve and was sent to prison labor camp in Tobolsk and exile on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan.

For many of the founding fathers of communism, exile under the Romanovs was a badge of honor.

V. I. Lenin, after organizing the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg, was arrested, spent 14 months in prison and was then banished to Siberia for three years in 1897.

When Nicolas II abdicated in 1917, Josef Stalin was in exile in eastern Siberia.

In power, the Communists took up the institution of exile, but with a big difference--they often chose areas where conditions were so brutal that those exiled would almost certainly die.

In comparison, Lenin lived almost a life of luxury--at Shushenskoye, he had a snug log cabin and books to read; he went hunting often and had a lamb slain every week to provide fresh chops.

The most celebrated exile of Soviet times was arguably Andrei D. Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner who was forcibly relocated by the KGB to the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in January, 1980, after strongly opposing the Kremlin’s military intervention in Afghanistan.

In Sakharov’s case, there was not even a trial to justify the punishment.

Timofeyev, an economist and author of dissident samizdat , or underground writings, was sentenced to six years of labor camp followed by five years of internal exile for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”

He was pardoned after serving two years in detention.

While hailing Thursday’s vote, he said much more remains to be done for the 500,000 Russians that Yerin has said are serving prison and labor camp terms and the 200,000 others in jail under investigation or awaiting trial.

“We should speak about the terrible conditions of people serving sentences in prison,” Timofeyev said.

“No new prisons have been built of late. All the old ones are overcrowded. And the situation of prisoners in labor camps has not changed at all.

“Their conditions are absolutely inhuman, including compulsory slave labor. So why should we comment on steps in the direction of normalcy?

“Instead, we must say that there is a long way to go yet.”