To Punish or Pardon?

"Like a drop in an ocean of cruelty," celebrated writer Anatoly Pristavkin, chairman of the Presidential Pardons Commission, fights to correct the wrongs made by the country's judicial system. Frankfurter Rundschau's Moscow correspondent, Florian Hassel, visited Pristavkin to see just how his commission operates. Photos by Vladimir Filonov.

There are moments when Anatoly Pristavkin simply cannot be merciful. Whenever a child molester or child murderer asks him for mercy, Pristavkin turns him down. "Violence against children hits a nerve with me, more than any other barbarity that we have to deal with," he says.

And there are many horrors that Pristavkin, as chairman of the Presidential Pardons Commission, has to consider. Take, for instance, the case of the three coal miners who out of boredom raped and buried a passing girl alive. To arm himself against such inhumanity, Pristavkin has covered many square meters of his office with brightly colored pictures of his 13-year-old daughter, Masha.

It is Tuesday morning, and Pristavkin, just as he does every Tuesday, has his hands full. At 2 p.m. the 16 other members of the pardons commission will sit down with Pristavkin at a long conference table to decide the fate of hundreds of thieves, murderers, rapists and blackmailers. Pristavkin again goes over the file with the 222 applications that the commission will consider this day.

He has already formed his opinion on Valentin Ageyev, a convict from the Altai region who stabbed his wife when she wanted to leave him. "Granted," he has written on the report compiled by Kremlin lawyers on Ageyev, citing his good behavior in a labor camp. "If the majority of the commission concurs, we will reduce his sentence from eight to six or seven years."

A request by Natalya Charova puts Pristavkin's principles to the test. The 24-year-old nurse gave her 1-year-old daughter a fatal dose of acid and then tried to kill herself. Her sentence: eight years in a labor camp. "On the one hand it is a brutal murder of a child, and on the other an obvious personal tragedy," says Pristavkin. "Sometimes we confront mothers who kill themselves and their children because they don't have any idea where the money for the next slice of bread is coming from."

Pristavkin and his colleagues are the last hope of an expedited release for about 1 million prisoners. The commission is also unique; unlike in other countries, where government officials decide the fate of convicts' pardons, Pristavkin's group is staffed by intellectuals. Indeed, like Pristavkin, many of the commission members come from the Writers' Union, among them Marietta Chudakova, Mikhail Bulgakov's biographer. In addition to the writers there is a former judge, a surgeon, a philosopher and a Russian Orthodox priest.

Each of the commission members goes through a 100-page chronicle of horror every week, deciding the fate of each individual. Formally, it is not the commission that grants the pardon but the president. However, former President Boris Yeltsin signed the recommended pardons almost without question. Pristavkin hopes that President Vladimir Putin will also prove to be a merciful master. In the last year Putin has signed 12,500.



Only rarely does the commission find itself in the spotlight. The last time this occurred was in December, when a special session was convened to decide the fate of alleged U.S. spy Edmond Pope after he had been sentenced to 20 years in prison. Pristavkin and his colleagues quickly agreed to recommend that the president pardon Pope. Seven days later Putin let Pope fly home.

Aside from occasional incidents such as these, the commission's routine work is conducted out of the public's eye. Each week 5000 requests for pardons from prison camps throughout the country reach the Kremlin, of which several hundred are passed on to the commission for consideration. "We decide most cases quickly and without discussion," Pristavkin says. If opinions are divided, the chairman reaches into a shopping cart overflowing with trial documents relevant to each applicant. "When we have many tricky cases, we sometimes sit together until midnight."

In the nine years since he became chairman of the Presidential Pardons Commission, thousands of requests, court documents and human right reports have passed over Pristavkin's desk.

These documents draw a picture of unemployment, social decline, abandoned youth clubs and alcohol abuse, Pristavkin says, adding that these are the causes of most criminal offences, about 80 percent of which are petty theft or minor crimes. "More than 80 percent of all crimes are committed by drunks. Alcoholism is Russia's greatest misfortune."

"While the worst criminals usually get off, the police, the prosecutor's office and the courts pursue small criminals mercilessly. That's how they want to convince the public that they are fighting crime," Pristavkin adds.

Pristavkin jumps up and gets Alexei Popkov's pardon request from his desk. The young man comes from a village in the Volga region where there are no jobs. The 16-year-old was sentenced to five years in a labor camp for petty theft (he stole about $8 worth of goods) and fighting with others his age. "Anatoly Ignatyevitch," Pristavkin reads, "Hear my cry from the soul and don't throw my request into the wastepaper basket. "

"We checked all the facts, I read out the letter to the commission, and we pardoned the boy," Pristavkin says. "The tragedy is that we get hundreds of letters like this one." To prove his point Pristavkin indiscriminately reads from files prepared for that day's meeting: "Kiselyov, Alexander, given five years for the theft of five sacks of flour; Kovalyov, Anatoly, 5 1/2 years for two stolen car radios; Kozlov, Alexander, six years for stealing a bag worth $11. Our police and the courts turn these people into professional criminals with their oppressive behavior."

Ten years ago, the 69-year-old Pristavkin would have laughed at anyone who predicted that he would spend the next decade deciding the fate of Russia's convicts. A member of the cultural elite, his modern classic "A Golden Cloud There Rested," had a print run of 4 1/2 million. Royalties from overseas publications ensured Pristavkin a worry free, if not wealthy, old age.

However, back in 1991 Pristavkin hadn't anticipated that he would get a call from his old friend, prominent human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov. Having been appointed by President Boris Yeltsin as chairman of the newly created parliamentary human rights committee, the former political dissident was convinced that the then democratically tuned Yeltsin was eager to create a pardons commission oriented on western legal standards. He was also convinced that the commission should be staffed by prominent intellectuals.



At first Kovalyov's invitations to chair the new commission received one rejection after another. Even Pristavkin at first rejected the offer, but Kovalyov did not give up. In November 1991 he called Pristavkin and said: "Anatoly, put on the tea kettle. I have to talk with you." Kovalyov talked until 3 a.m. grimly describing the fate of these prisoners, but Pristavkin again refused the offer. "Listen, Sergei, I have a young wife, a young child and a novel to write. Find yourself someone else," Pristavkin said at the time.

When Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted one month later and Yeltsin, the new master of the Kremlin, replaced the Soviet flag with the Russian one, Pristavkin was working on a manuscript in a writers' home in Riga. A few days after that historic transition the receptionist called him to the telephone: "Anatoly Ignatyevich, the Kremlin is on the line. Congratulations. Boris Nikolayevich has just signed the decree on your appointment as chairman of the Pardons Commission. "But, I am still writing my novel..." Pristavkin replied. "Anatoly Ignatyevich, keep writing. But you are expected here in Moscow in one week. If the commission doesn't start working, those who are condemned to death will be immediately executed." Hours later Pristavkin packed his suitcase.

Soon thereafter Pristavkin moved into his new offices near Red Square, where the irony of his quarters was not lost on him: they were assigned an unattractive concrete block that had formerly housed the disciplinary committee of the Communist Party. Pristavkin's office had a 15-meter long conference table and seven government telephones all laid out in the manner Soviet officials used to intimidate entering visitors. The previous room's occupant had been top party official Boris Pugo. "When Pugo received someone, the ambulance staff stood ready in the waiting room," Pristavkin said. "Usually a party secretary or minister fainted if Pugo announced that he had been expelled from the party and that in one blow they had lost their post, government car and state dacha."

In order to purge the shadows of the past, Pristavkin had an Orthodox priest bless the room with holy water before the commission took up its work.

The first years of the Yeltsin era were the simplest for Pristavkin and his colleagues. Yeltsin signed all the pardon decrees the commission submitted without comment, even those for people condemned to death. But in 1994 work came to a stand still after the pardon requests the commission received from the administration trickled to next to nothing. It took some time for Pristavkin to discover who had sabotaged its work ?€” Andrei Voikov, then deputy head of the Kremlin administration. Voikov considered forgiveness of convicts as simply unnecessary. In this he was not alone: The long-serving General Prosecutor Yury Skuratov had suggested many times to Yeltsin that the pardons commission be abolished. Only after Yeltsin was reelected in 1996 and Pristavkin met with the new Kremlin administrative boss, Anatoly Chubais, was the ban broken.

No mercy toward prisoners is still the rule in Russia, Pristavkin says. Seven decades of Soviet propaganda, when every detainee was a potential enemy of the people, had a lasting effect on society. Although death sentences in Russia were banned by the Constitutional Court in April 1999, and a few months later then President Yeltsin commuted all the sentences of those sitting on death row to a life sentence, Pristavkin believes the tide is turning. "When I ask children in a German grade school who supports the death penalty, hardly a hand rises. But in Russia today three-quarters of the population are once again for the death penalty," he says.

But Valery Abramkin, whose Center for Penal Reform fights for the rights of prisoners, is more optimistic. Seven years ago a poll showed that only one-third of those questioned supported an amnesty for prisoners. Today that figure is up to two-thirds. According to Abramkin, his center used to get regular letters from people who accused them of helping criminals. "The center hardly gets any [of those] letters anymore, and our weekly radio program Oblako dealing with legal topics and tips for prisoners has an audience that long ago extended beyond the walls of camps and prisons."

But Pristavkin remains skeptical. About a quarter of all Russian men are held in detention at least once ?€” that alone should provide basis for more understanding of those on the inside. But that, he says, is not the case. "Convicts develop a blinkered mentality. They see themselves alone as innocents, while everyone else is guilty. No sooner are they free, than many of them return to their earlier contempt [of other convicts]," Pristavkin says. "Even those who have been sentenced to death and then pardoned by the commission write to me and lobby for the death penalty. It will be a long time before Russia's moral perestroika is completed. "

Pristavkin says he will continue his work as long as his health allows it. He may not get paid for his labors, but the writer still comes into the office almost every day. He has also had to abandon his former profession. Indeed, Pristavkin has not written one novel since he took up his work with the commission. "I don't regret it, " he says, opening a new file. " Our commission is like a drop in an ocean of cruelty. This work is the most important of my life. "