Russia Not Executing Prisoners, but 20% of Lifers Said to Prefer Death

Russia has suspended executions in line with a promise to the Council of Europe, but a justice official said Thursday that many prisoners now being sent to harsh labor camps for life would actually prefer to die.

Anatoly Pristavkin, the head of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s commission on pardons, said about 20% of those pardoned did not want to live on.

“We are receiving letters from prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment who are begging for death,” he said by telephone.

Prisoners spared by Yeltsin on the committee’s recommendation are sent to camps with especially harsh conditions, often in the frozen north.

“Russia has created concentration camps for those with life imprisonment,” said Pristavkin, a writer and human rights activist. “It has not followed the European way, where such prisoners are kept in normal jails together with everyone else.”

The weekly Itogi magazine said in December that prisoners in two special camps for life inmates were being confined to tiny cells for 23 hours a day. They were not allowed to work, and most were ill.