Executions Accelerate in Russia

The days pass slowly in Cell No. 103. Alexei Velichko and his three cellmates read dog-eared books, nap on bunks and stare blankly at four green walls. Sometimes they talk but never about death, which hangs as heavy as the foul cigarette haze here on Russia’s Death Row.

Velichko, a professional hunter with no previous criminal record, killed a drunken forest ranger during an argument two years ago. A quick trial was followed by a death sentence. Now he spends 24 hours a day in this coffin-shaped cell, emerging for a monthly visit with his wife and 7-year-old son, who always cries when he sees his father.

“Do I have hope?” said Velichko, eyeing his questioner, thinking it over. “It’s the hope that dies last. A person like me lives only on hope.”

The 29-year-old inmate probably will be executed, as will the other 18 men who wear the black and gray stripes of Death Row in this provincial capital 300 miles south of Moscow. So will the 630 inmates in similar circumstances across Russia and those being sentenced to death at the rate of one every few days.

In each case, a single bullet will be fired into the back of the inmate’s head. The body will be burned; the family will never see the ashes.

Huge societal changes have rocked Russia in its tortured transition to democracy, and now, in the run-up to the June 16 presidential election, the future of capital punishment is emerging as yet another sign of that upheaval.

On one side are Russian leaders seeking acceptance in the capitals of Western Europe, where the death penalty is banned. On the other is an electorate fed up with skyrocketing crime, demanding vengeance at the ultimate price.

In some ways, the debate in Russia mirrors that in the United States, where the death penalty is legal in California and 37 other states. On Friday, Keith Daniel Williams, 48, who murdered three Merced County residents, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at San Quentin. His appeal for clemency was denied last week by Gov. Pete Wilson, who declared that “for certain crimes, justice demands the ultimate punishment.”

Williams will be the second inmate put to death in California this year and the fourth since the state lifted a 25-year moratorium on the death penalty in 1992.

That same year, the death penalty in Russia seemed on its way out. To great fanfare, President Boris N. Yeltsin created a Death Penalty Review Commission heavily weighted with mercy-minded intellectuals. He followed the panel’s recommendations religiously, commuting 340 of 365 death sentences during its first three years.

But suddenly, the pendulum has swung back sharply, and Yeltsin has been rejecting commission recommendations. Since the beginning of 1995, he has commuted only five death sentences and ordered 132 executions. (By comparison, 56 inmates were executed in the United States last year.) Not a single inmate has been spared by the Russian president in the past year, commission officials say.

“Our opinion plays no role whatsoever anymore,” said Anatoly Pristavkin, a noted novelist and chairman of the review commission. “These executions will be carried out. No one can stop them except the president himself. And he knows the public sentiment. He knows what he’s doing. For now, there will be no more mercy.”

Yeltsin’s apparent change of heart is part of a risky political game. Frustrated by his government’s inability to stop rising crime, he is wooing voters with a new hard line on executions.

“Everything is geared to politics now,” said Pristavkin. “He who dares to say he’s going to abolish capital punishment will certainly lose a lot of votes.”

At the same time, in an attempt to be accepted as a partner by European nations, Yeltsin has promised to abolish the death penalty within three years.

Getting rid of capital punishment is a requirement for joining the Council of Europe, a group concerned with human rights issues. And council membership is viewed by Russian leaders as an important step toward joining the economic powers of Europe.

Although capital punishment was abolished three times in Russia during the early part of the century, those pauses were brief. Since the procedure was last reinstituted, in the mid-1950s, Russia has had one of the world’s highest execution rates. In the past decade, at least 1,200 people have been put to death, according to the Death Penalty Review Commission. That is nearly three times the number of inmates executed in the United States over the past 20 years.

While Williams has been on California’s Death Row for 17 years, most Russian inmates spend no more than a year or two waiting for the sentence to be carried out. Any appeal in Russia is dealt with quickly--too quickly in the view of human rights activists.

Unlike in the United States, the whole process of executions in Russia remains shrouded in secrecy, as it has been since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin made them a state secret, in 1934, to hide the full scope of his purges. Only rarely does the government announce executions or are total figures published. And when Yeltsin formally turns down an appeal for clemency, the inmate isn’t told until seconds before his execution.

Velichko is one of 19 men crammed into eight cells here at Pretrial Detention Center No. 31/1. In addition to Death Row inmates, the center--built for 1,600 convicts--holds 2,600 prisoners awaiting trial or the outcome of appeals.

Death Row, known here as IMN, the Russian abbreviation for Highest Measure of Punishment, lies deep inside a dilapidated prison block built in 1861. Although prison rules require a single Death Row inmate per cell, “we cannot afford this luxury,” said the warden, Lt. Col. Vladimir P. Demidov.

The doomed inmates are isolated from the rest of the prison population behind heavy iron doors in fully enclosed cells, each with a single window set behind rows of bars.

They are allowed to put sheets on their beds, unlike ordinary inmates. Otherwise, they are heavily restricted, prohibited from walking in the prison yard, receiving packages from friends and relatives or even seeing other Death Row inmates except their cellmates. They are allowed out of their cells only for monthly family visits, weekly showers and regular cell checks by the guards. There has never been an escape from this Death Row.

Velichko wound up here after killing Valery Gussev. Both men came from Fisenkovo, a small village nearly 200 miles south of Voronezh. They had known each other since childhood.

The trouble began when Velichko and his brother were driving to their parents’ house for a New Year’s Eve celebration in 1993. They spotted a fox in the forest, parked their car and pursued the animal on foot. Gussev, who was driving by, stopped the hunters. Drunk and out of uniform, he demanded to see Velichko’s hunting license and, according to Velichko, struck him several times with the butt of a rifle. Velichko fired his double-barreled rifle, slaying the ranger.

His trial on charges of killing the law officer lasted three days. His appeals, though supported by the victim’s family, were denied.

“It was a showcase trial to intimidate other hunters,” Velichko said. “Nobody made the slightest attempt to understand the circumstances of the crime.”

Now his application is waiting to be heard by the Death Penalty Review Commission.

Asked if he feels remorse, Velichko, a balding man with a thin black mustache, responded slowly.

“He was a friend of mine,” he said of the victim. “Both his family and mine are very sorry about this.

“I don’t care what’s going to happen to me,” Velichko added. “The only person I care about is my son. I try to reassure him. But he’s a small kid and doesn’t understand the complexities of life.”

Velichko, like others on Death Row, complains that the Russian judicial system is replete with errors and unfairness. But he says he supports capital punishment in the case of the most serious crimes.

“If people were being tried justly and fairly for crimes they committed, then that’s fine,” he said. “But a criminal shouldn’t be killed just because the prosecutor doesn’t like him.”

The warden here believes that the problem is that not enough people are being executed.

“It is a major deterrent, but these days not enough [death sentences] are being carried out,” Demidov complained. “If you think of how many tears the victims’ families have shed, it’s the scourge of our society that more people aren’t executed.”

That is about to change here. After a hiatus of several years, execution orders have begun arriving. Prison officials received word recently that Yeltsin turned down two inmates’ appeals. Soon, the prisoners will be taken to a secret execution facility (“toward Moscow,” is all the warden will say).

“There is no preliminary notification,” Demidov said. “When we get final word, a convoy will show up. We grab him, but we don’t tell him. We’re trying to avoid panic or stress.”

The condemned men here are only dimly aware of the debate raging over capital punishment. And they, like many citizens, are confused by what they hear.

Lt. Gen. Yuri Kalinin, chief of the Russian prison service, said that “the death penalty will be abolished. It’s going to take some time, but Russia will definitely meet its obligations. Russia is not a wayward country. It doesn’t make political declarations and then change its mind.”

Still, Kalinin acknowledges that ending capital punishment will be unpopular.

“The rank-and-file citizens are very vengeful by nature, and they share this misconception that if you kill someone, you should be executed yourself,” he said. “But a government’s responsibility is to look at the future rather than the present.

“To tell the truth,” he added, “it would be much easier to execute all prisoners. Out of sight, out of mind. But we’ve tried that before and it doesn’t work.”

In fact, it was Stalin who said: “If there is a person, there is a problem. If there is no person, there is no problem.”

Today the country’s old, overcrowded and underfunded prisons are themselves a major problem, especially with the crime wave that has ridden in with the opening of Russia’s economy. The 1,000 prisons and penal colonies house 1 million inmates, about the same number as are incarcerated in the United States, which has a population nearly twice that of Russia.

The poor prison conditions are one reason that some in Yeltsin’s government oppose moves to replace the death penalty with life sentences. Under current law, courts have two options in a murder case: 20 years in prison or death. Death sentences, however, can be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A law under consideration would allow judges to impose life sentences in murder cases, which death penalty opponents believe would sharply reduce executions. But the country has only one maximum-security prison, and officials say it would need five or six to hold inmates sentenced to life.

“Crime has shot up, and there’s simply not enough room in jail for these prisoners,” said Sergei Romazin, who heads the Department for Ensuring Judicial Reform in the government’s Justice Ministry.

Romazin, like other officials, insists that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent. But, he asked, “how can we solve the issue of capital punishment against this background of rising crime? The people are unambiguous--they want crime punished.”

The last hope for Death Row inmates remains Yeltsin and the Death Penalty Review Commission. Every Tuesday in Moscow, the commission meets in a conference room, near Red Square, an office where a top Communist Party official once made other fateful decisions--on whether citizens were legally party members.

The panel’s 13 members usually consider seven death penalty cases, often with heated debate. They also review less serious criminal cases for signs of trial errors or miscarriages of justice.

“At first, we were managing to get something done,” said Pristavkin, the chairman. “But now the attitude toward us has drastically changed in the government. And, unfortunately, the bulk of the population also feels that executing criminals is the only efficient way of fighting crime.”

When it became clear that Yeltsin was turning down all recommendations for mercy, commission members tried to stall by reviewing fewer applications. But they were thwarted by Yeltsin’s aides.

“We are absolutely helpless,” Pristavkin said. “I’m convinced that the only reason we haven’t been disbanded yet is because it would be inexpedient on the eve of the elections.”