Yeltsin Packs Death Row In Answer to Crimewave

The number of executions of prisoners will rise sharply over the next few months because President Boris Yeltsin has reduced grants of clemency in response to accusations that he is soft on crime, a senior presidential adviser said.


So far this year Yeltsin has rejected 14 appeals for clemency and is likely to reject several more before the end of the year, Anatoly Pristavkin, head of the president's Clemency Commission, said Wednesday.


In 1993 there were only four executions after the president refused to commute death sentences, the last chance to escape a shot in the back of the head. But as crime has risen, and with it public calls for tougher punishment, the president has appeared less and less inclined to commute death sentences to life in prison.


Four prisoners were shot in the first nine months of 1994, but Pristavkin said he expected a rash of executions shortly.


"We are under pressure from all sides," Pristavkin said. "The Interior Ministry is very dissatisfied, and the judges and prosecutors are complaining. Even the presidential administration is leaning heavily on us."


Even if 20 convicts are executed this year, however, that figure would be a far cry from Soviet-era statistics. More than 21,000 convicts were shot between 1960 and 1990, an average of 700 a year, far surpassing execution rates in any other country, Pristavkin said.


While Yeltsin is getting tougher on convicts, he shows little inclination to return to Soviet practices. The vast majority of the more than 150 death sentences Yeltsin will review this year will still be reduced to life in prison, Pristavkin said.


But Russians are clearly not happy with what they perceive to be Yeltsin's leniency, and Pristavkin and others say the president is giving in to popular pressure. This could bode ill for the more than 500 convicts who are still on death row, death penalty opponents say.


"The people want blood," said Viktor Kogan-Yasny, head of the Right to Life and Civil Dignity Society. "The death penalty will be implemented more widely."


In a September letter to Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin's chief of staff, a presidential adviser cited a July opinion poll saying that 67.9 percent of Russians supported the death penalty.


"We think it is premature to raise the question of abolishing capital punishment at the moment," wrote Yevgeny Yasin, then head of the presidential Analysis Center and now the economics minister.


In the same letter, Yasin also accused the Clemency Commission of incompetence and bias, adding that Yeltsin's opponents could use the clemencies to attack him for being soft on crime.


The Clemency Commission, a group of public figures that includes a bard, a former political prisoner and a prominent priest, meets weekly to draft recommendations to Yeltsin. Serial or professional killers and soldiers who kill during hazing incidents are least likely to get clemency, Pristavkin said.


One opponent of the death penalty, speaking on condition of anonymity, predicted that Yeltsin would soon replace Pristavkin, a former dissident novelist, with a chairman who is tougher on clemency appeals.


Pristavkin said, however, "There is no talk of this yet. But if I leave, the commission leaves." In their place could only come a group more supportive of capital punishment, he added.


Until 1993, there was no life sentence. Those convicted could get up to 15 years or execution, but Pristavkin lobbied successfully for introduction of a life term as an alternative to execution.


Convicts are shot without warning in standard jails where they are held with common prisoners awaiting trial, rather than in high-security prisons. Conditions are often so miserable that convicts beg to be shot, Kogan-Yasny said.


Pristavkin may be accused of being soft on the death sentence, but he has his reasons. He cited the case of Alexander Kravchenko, who was executed for two murders that were later confessed by serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Chikatilo was executed earlier this year.