[notdownwidems]

> In the old USSR, a 10 year sentence was the shocking extreme you could get short of a death penalty.

IIRC from reading Solzhenitzyn, Robert Conquest and others, 25-year sentences during the Stalin era were not at all uncommon.

[Leaning Right]

On of Stalin’s constitutions did fix 10 years as the maximum jail sentence. Any “criminal” that warranted a more severe sentence got the death penalty.

But as I noted before, it was common Soviet practice to run 10 year sentences one after another. And as for the 25 year sentence you mentioned, I don’t doubt it. That was probably given when another constitution was in force.

I remember this stuff because I was - for a year - a political science major in college. Then I wised up and switched over to chemistry.