We shall say no more about the way in which different government bodies tackled these issues. Specialist monographs would be required to tell the story in precise detail. But we can draw a few provisional conclusions. The Stalinist system of hard unpaid slave labour by prisoners – most of them convicted of common-law offences, but many of them ‘counter-revolutionaries’ who had committed no crime – was now a thing of the past. The same applies to mass exile settlements where more than 2 million people served sentences, often for life: in 1960, these were almost entirely emptied of inmates and such sentences were largely discontinued.[3] On the other hand, normalization of the prison and penal complex was not straightforward in a system that had inherited a strong inclination to punish without concerning itself unduly with proof of guilt. If that system had nothing to do with justice, the 1960s saw an attempt to create a proper justice system. This is what clearly emerges if we turn to the intensive drafting and redrafting of the criminal and prison codes by penal institutions and the government bodies responsible for them. The discussions and pressures for further change that began immediately after the war developed with Khrushchev’s arrival in power, and continued almost to the very end of the Soviet system. A rapid survey of the legislation in force in 1984 provides a picture of the juridical principles that governed the treatment of offenders down to 1991.
In particular, we shall examine penal policy and ‘prison labour law’ as set out in the relevant codes and commentaries on them. This is a rather onerous exercise, but since the discovery of Hammurabi’s code historians have known how instructive legal texts can be – even if they are not always followed. The changes introduced by these codes should not be underestimated.[4] This particularly applies to the right now enjoyed by prisoners to meet with their lawyers, without time limits and with no guards present. This formed part of a broader definition of prisoners’ rights, based on a premise to which the codes and jurisprudence devoted much space – namely, that imprisonment does not entail loss of the status of citizen and hence of citizens’ rights. Punishment restricts such rights, of course, but prisoners continue to belong to the community of citizens. The restrictions were serious: a prisoner’s wife could divorce him without waiting for his release, prisoners did not have the right to vote, they could not freely dispose of their own money, and so on. But they enjoyed the basic right to criticize and launch complaints against the prison administration. They could do so directly, in a letter to the administration, which was obliged to respond. They could also appeal to other instances (party and state) via the prison administration. The latter would probably seek to persuade the prisoner not to proceed with a complaint, but if he insisted the administration was obliged to submit it. Should it fail to do so, he could disclose the matter to visiting family or friends. The prison administration was not entitled to open prisoners’ letters to prosecutors and had to forward them within twenty-four hours.
As pointed out, an important advance was the prisoner’s right to see a lawyer with no time limit. Another source indicates that lawyers’ visits to prisoners came under the section on ‘visiting rights’.[5] But they were regulated by the ‘correctional labour codes’ of the republics, not by the All-Union code. Unless these codes specified otherwise, meetings with a lawyer were to be authorized following a written request by the prisoner, a member of his family, or a representative of a public organization. They were to be conducted outside working hours and the lawyer must be duly accredited. If so requested by prisoner or lawyer, the meeting was to be held in private. (I must confess that discovering these legal provisions in the texts of the late 1970s and early 1980s came as a surprise.)
There is plentiful evidence from prosecutors, courts and local bodies of the large number of complaints from prisoners received by the Ministry of Internal Affairs itself, government supervisory agencies (central and local), regional bodies and public organizations. They were more or less carefully investigated, or passed on to more competent authorities.[6] Legal power to monitor respect for the law inside places of confinement was granted to a number of bodies, of which the most powerful were the Prosecutor’s Office and state control agencies (whatever their current title). The MVD also had an internal general inspectorate, equipped with real power and able to conduct detailed inquiries. It was quite legitimately suspected of bias, given that the prison system came within its ministry’s domain. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that senior ministerial officials were well informed of the situation.
The control exercised by the higher courts over compliance with the law in the justice system had an influence on the bodies in charge of penal institutions. Such courts handled cases of violations by prison administrations and appeals, as well as cases requiring adjudication of the appropriateness of a sentence. Their activity certainly had an impact on the lot of prisoners and the atmosphere of the prison system in general. The right of social bodies to take an interest in the fate of prisoners had a similar effect, because it now formed one of a set of rights and possibilities of redress.
Political prisoners, including the better-known dissidents, were not entirely denied access to judicial review or channels for complaints. Protests by scientists and other members of the intelligentsia, addressed directly to the Central Committee or other high instances, or transmitted by confidential channels, are well documented. Some of them could be quite effective. International pressure also had an impact, prompting the authorities to prefer stripping dissidents of their nationality and exiling them abroad to keeping them in prison. We shall return to this subject.
The concern on the part of the authorities and judges not to have minor offenders mix with dangerous criminals – a principle adopted by democratic systems – led to the creation of institutions for different categories of prisoner with corresponding regimes. People serving a first sentence were separated from recidivists in all categories. There were separate institutions for women and minors. Finally, high-security complexes, isolated from the rest of the system, held those who had been convicted of ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’, ‘particularly dangerous recidivists’, and prisoners condemned to death but whose sentence had been commuted by a pardon or amnesty. Foreigners and stateless persons were also confined in separate prison establishments. Republics had the right to demand the separation of other categories as well. In contrast, none of these distinctions applied in prison hospitals, whose regulations were determined by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in consultation with prosecutors.
3
This information derives not from the sources cited above, but from the appendix to my
4
My mam sources here are N. A. Struchkov,
5
N. A. Struchkov,
6
Ibid. The same author’s