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In March 1953, following the death of Stalin, an amnesty of Gulag prisoners was initiated by Lavrentii Beria. More than 1,200,000 prisoners serving sentences of five years or less were released. However, few political prisoners were released under this amnesty, since most of them had been sentenced to terms well above five years. In addition, the amnesty excluded those convicted of ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’.

Over the next few years, case reviews and rehabilitations of political prisoners swelled from a trickle to a flood, although this never became, as Nikita Khrushchev later said he had feared, ‘a flood which would drown us all’. Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Politburo for more than thirty years, observed that it would be impossible to declare at once that all the former ‘enemies of the people’ were innocent, because that would make it clear that ‘the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters’.

In April 1953, Pravda announced that an investigatory committee set up by Beria had found that ‘illegal methods’ had been used by the MGB to extract confessions from the doctors accused of taking part in the ‘Doctors’ Plot’. These doctors were exonerated, and, if still alive, released. The guilty MGB officials were arrested. Pravda’s editorial on this policy reversal promised that the Soviet Government would respect the constitutional rights of Soviet citizens.

During the years following the death of Stalin, thousands upon thousands of prisoners began to make their way back from Siberia across the vast expanses of the Soviet Union. Among them was Andrei.