This chapter treats the enforcement of deportations pursuent to the ukase (decree) of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium dated February 21st, 1948 "On the sending of particularly dangerous state criminals into exile, for the purpose of serving of their terms in settlements situated in far-away places of the USSR". In this decree there was no mention of any duration of internal exile, and only later it turned out that this implied a "settlement forever". This ukase contained a listing of places of exile: the "Kolyma district", several regions in Kazakhstan, as well as the Novosibirsk region and the region of Krasnoyarsk. But this compellingly were the territories "50 km north of the Transsiberian railroad".
No new files were issued on the convictions to internal exile; the punishment measures were inflicted on the basis of the "old" files, i.e. for a one and only offence (which, besides, had been invented) they determined to set another term.
The formalities for the internal exile had to be legalized by the OSO (Special Board) of the MGB (Ministery for State Security).The number of "particularly dangerous people" practically referred to the complete section (§) 58 (counter-revolutionary crimes), with the exception of sections 58.10 and 58.12 (ChSIR = members of the family of an enemy of the people).
In fact, everything, or almost everything, turned out to take a different course. Already in 1950 these exiles could get either to Krasnoyarsk or to Kansk, Achinsk and Nasarovo, to any place where more or less qualified labor forces were required. Fairly often, former prisoners, who had been convicted "merely" of section 58-10, were sent into exile after their camp term and even given the "letter formulation" SDE (socially dangerous element).
As a matter of fact, the notion of "internal exile subsequent to a camp term" is yet more far-reaching and comprehensive.
First of all, they sometimes (not very often) wrote out an exile term already within the sentence of the legal organ (usually some kind of tribunal); thus, the prisoner would be sent into internal exile immediately after his release from custody "on an entirely legal basis," namely the sentence.
Secondly, the Special Board in some cases amended parts (the rest) of the camp term into internal exile. Either at the end (or straight before the end) of the camp term just this Special Board "put an extra" term on just this "case" - not to be spent in a camp, but in exile.
Similar cases are not going to be treated in detail in this survey, as they are more or less isolated instances, although they were not rare. In this context it is difficult to talk of definite streams of exiles (except, maybe, the exile of wives of traitors to the motherland from the Temlag (Temnikovsk corrective labor camp) in the year 1940, when the camp term was amended into exile (see section 10.1).