Without the right of correspondence

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"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 a large number of cases during the Great Purge the oral sentence was "10 years of corrective labor camps without the right of corrsepondence", which was announced to relatives, while the paperwork contained the real sentence: "the highest degree of punishment: execution by shooting".^[1]

[edit] 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 Ulrikh, the latter told that Koltsov was sentenced to 10 years WRC)[1]
• Matvei Petrovich Bronstein (executed in 1937), a theoretical physicist, a pioneer of quantum gravity

[edit] References

1. ^ "An Aluminum Cross", a documentary case published in Zvezda magazine #7, 2003

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