Russians Outlaw Legal Exile To Siberia

MOSCOW - Russian legislators, making a historic update to the Criminal Code, yesterday 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.

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 taiga (tundra).

To Russians, the system became known as khimia, or "chemistry," since chemical plants producing deadly substances traditionally employed these hapless, unprotected parolees.

Conscious of the dangers now posed by crime in Russia's liberalized society, the Supreme Soviet also toughened punishment for attempted escapes from prisons and detention centers from three to five additional years of confinement. Punishment for hostage-taking was also toughened.

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

They will be the last in a long line of legal pariahs. These included many of the "Decembrists," or 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 was reprieved and sent to a prison labor camp in Tobolsk and exile in Kazakhstan.

For many of the founding fathers of Communism, exile under the czars 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 Czar 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.

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

While hailing yesterday's vote, Interior Minister Victor Yerin said much more remained to be done for 500,000 Russians who he said are serving prison and labor-camp terms and 200,000 others in jail under investigation or awaiting trial.