Sectarians in Soviet Courts

Abstract

peared in both the United States and the Soviet Union in early 1965. The United States Supreme Court extended the conscientious objectors' exemption to draftees who professed the most vague and tenuous of beliefs. In the Soviet Union, however, no such exemption has existed for many years, and the case of Strulya, a conscientious objector, made its way from Siberia to Moscow, only because it was his second conviction. Since Strulya had fully served his previous sentence as a conscientious objector, an appellate court in Tomsk held that he could not again be convicted of the same crime, and dismissed the case as to him. (Apparently others had been convicted with him.) At this point, the Vice President of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR protested the decision and brought the case before his court. The result was that the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation held that Strulya's second refusal of the draft call constituted a new and separately punishable crime.1 His conviction was reinstated. Both Strulya's convictions (in 1957 and again in 1964) were of the aggravated form (in U.S. parlance, first degree) of the crime, with a possible penalty of five years' deprivation of liberty. The excerpt of the opinion does not elucidate the basis for this severity. In any event, the Strulya case clearly confronts Soviet conscientious objectors with the threat of a series of heavy sentences throughout the years of their military usefulness.