Without the right of correspondence

"Without the right of correspondence", WRC (Russian: Без права переписки, abbreviated as БПП in official documents) was a clause in a sentence of many political convicts in the Soviet Union.

In a large number of cases during the Great Purge, the oral sentence was "10 years of corrective labor camps without the right of correspondence", which was announced to relatives, while the paperwork contained the real sentence: "the highest degree of punishment: execution by shooting".^[1][2] Many people did not understand the official euphemism and incorrectly believed that their relative was still alive in prison.^[2] As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it in The Gulag Archipelago:

"Deprived of the right to correspond." And that means once and for all. "No right to correspondence"—and that almost for certain means: "Has been shot."^[3]

Cases of deception

• Mikhail Koltsov (a Soviet writer and correspondent, a prototype of Karkov in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls) executed February 2, 1940. When his brother, Boris Efimov, by a miracle got an appointment with Vasiliy Ulrikh, the latter told him that Koltsov was sentenced to 10 years WRC.^[4]
• Matvei Petrovich Bronstein (executed in 1937), a theoretical physicist, a pioneer of quantum gravity

References

1. "An Aluminum Cross", a documentary case published in Zvezda magazine #7, 2003
2. Cohen, Stephen F. (2011). The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin. London: I. B. Tauris. p. 68. ISBN 978-1-84885-848-0.
3. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander (1974). The Gulag Archipelago. I. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. p. 6. ISBN 0-06-092103-X.
4. Михаил Ефимович Кольцов — За что? Почему? (часть-1)

External links

• Desyat let bez prava perepiski at the Internet Movie Database, a 1990 Russian film ("Ten Years without the Right of Correspondence")