You are confused. What happened is that some brave souls did their ten years, and immediately upon release picked up with the dissent right where they left off and were arrested again on a new charge.
And of course surviving the prisons and gulags for 10 years is another matter. But in old Russian Imperial and Soviet law, 10 years was the max a judge could impose.
In America now we see 17 years for leading a protest. Even if you call it a riot that is utterly abusive. And the sentences we see now of well over 100 years are a farce and proof of our authoritarian government.
Right now Trump faces 641 years in Prison. That absurdity doesn’t happen anywhere else on earth.
“You are confused. What happened is that some brave souls did their ten years, and immediately upon release picked up with the dissent right where they left off and were arrested again on a new charge.”
False. Go read Solzhenitsyn, a first-hand witness to the Gulag. For political prisoners imprisoned under Section 58 it was standard practice to immediately resentence them to another 10 years (and then after that to 5 years of deprivation of civil rights) immediately upon the expiration of their term, without them ever being released. Of course the Soviets would say “well we interrogated them and they were still dissidents”, but that was simply wallpapering.
I mean, the death sentence was also “technically” outlawed in the Soviet Union, but that did not stop them from giving thousands and thousands of prisoners the death penalty. They simply summarily executed them as soon as they were arrested, rather than giving them a judicial hearing where they could not be sentenced to death. Anyone who believes that what the Soviet law books said reflected the actual practice of the law in the Soviet Union was is a fool.