Without the right of correspondence


"Without the right of correspondence" was a clause in a sentence of many political convicts in the Soviet Union.

Meaning

WRC was used as a euphemism to cover the true nature of a court sentence.
In many cases during the late 1930s 'Great Purge' campaign of political repression, the sentence handed down 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". Many people did not understand the official euphemism and incorrectly believed that their relative was still alive in prison; this gave officials 10 years to invent an 'accident' in the prison camps that had killed the 'prisoner', as an explanation for why the victim did not return.
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it in The Gulag Archipelago:
For example, all of the bodies identified from the mass graves at Vinnytsia and Kuropaty had received a WRC sentence.

Notable victims