I just thought of this… were prisoners who were sentenced under the USSR released when the USSR became the Russian Federation or did they have to finish their sentences given out under the USSR? I believe the constitution and governing documents of Russia changed when it went from Soviet to Federation, so would people still have to serve the sentence of the old regime?
Presumably, they still served out their sentences. That’s typical of such situations.
For example, after WWII ended, gays in concentration camps were just transferred to German prisons to continue serving their ‘sentences’.
After Prohibition was repealed in the US, all the bootleggers in prisons stayed in prisons.
In US States that have legalized private marijuana possession/use, people in prison for previous marijuana crimes were not released. Even those arrested but not yet tried were eventually tried, convicted, and imprisoned. (Though parole boards may now be more lenient.)
I sort of suspect the OP meant political prisoners, not some guy named Yuri who beat up and robbed some hookers.
Apparently Gorbachev had already closed labour camps for political prisoners (and released them) in 1985, some years before the collapse of the Soviet Union:
http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/after/fall.php
The USSR didn’t become the Russian Federation, strictly speaking. Russia was one of the constituent republics of the USSR. Although the USSR was dissolved, and Russia itself underwent constitutional change, I’m pretty sure that there was legal continuity between Russia before the Soviet dissolution and Russia afterwards.
This. A far more interesting question would be what happened to prisoners (not even just political ones) in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the three constituent republics of the USSR which, upon asserting independence, denied that they had ever been legally part of the Soviet Union, and declared the continuity of their pre-Soviet constitutions and laws. I know that this effectively denied citizenship to millions of people who had been born and raised there. It wouldn’t surprise me if it also resulted in mass freeing of certain categories prisoners – pretty much anyone imprisoned for a crime which was illegal in the Soviet Union but not under the pre-Soviet law would have had a good argument for their release.
One of the common crimes under which low level political offenders in the Soviet Union were sentenced was a catch-all crime called ‘hooliganism’. This is still a crime in Russia (I believe P*ssy Riot was sentenced for hooliganism when they broke into that church).
In international law, though, the Russian Federation is regarded as the successor state to the Soviet Union. It inherited the Soviet Union’s status as a member of international organisations. For instance, the Russian Federation did not have to re-apply for UN membership, and even inherited the Security Council seat; this is in contrast, e.g., with the country that is now called Serbia, was called Serbia and Montenegro for some time in the early 2000s, and called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This country claimed to be the successor to the pre-1991 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including succession into its UN membership, but the UN did not buy this argument and required Yugoslavia/Serbia to reapply.
Furthermore, the Russian Federation succeeded into the Soviet Union’s other treaty rights and obligations, e.g. the ABM treaty. In an international law sense, there certainly is a legal continuity from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation, not just from the Russian Socialist Federative Socialist Republic (the constituent republic that Russia was within the Soviet Union pre-1991).
The interesting question, as has already been mentioned, is: what happens to political prisoners (in the broadest sense) once a dictatorship or a totalitarian government goes out of business. There are crimes that could be considered strictly “common” or “private” (e. g. murdering a spouse or molesting children) while many others can have a political connotation or are merely political in nature. Who should be kept in prison, who should be set free?
Normally, the rule is that laws, administrative decisions, and court judgments of the previous regime remain applicable to the extent they do not conflict with the new legal order. That was the approach adopted by Germany twice, in 1949 relating the Nazi era and in 1990 relating to East Germany. It also appears to be the approach adopted in Russia when it enacted its new constitution. It’s also a very sensible approach: Even in a totalitarian regime, there is a vast range of totally unpolitical day-to-day administrative business of the same nature as anywhere else - people get born, married and divorced, they get a driving licence, they gradudate with school diplomas or university degrees, and so on. All this triggers paperwork in the form of certificates and other documentation. Annulling all this and starting from scratch would be a nightmare in terms of administrative workload, so there is good reason to keep it in place (which is, incidentally, the reason why my father, born in the last few months of WWII in a not-yet-liberated part of Germany, still uses his birth certificate adorned with a swastika for official purposes).
The difficulty, of course, is to determine where such administrative nuts and bolts stuff ends, and the stuff that’s contradictory to the new legal order (and thus now inapplicable) begins. Ultimately, this can only be assessed on a case-by-case basis, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that pre-1991 convicts in Russia were, initially, kept in custody and had to apply for a re-assessment of their case by the new courts.
If you announce that everything the old regime did was null and void, then the results are basically what happened in Iraq Spring/Summer 2003.