101st kilometer

**«101st kilometer»** — method of political repressions in the USSR in 1920-1980s. Certain people who were subjected to it were prohibited from dwelling in and around Moscow and Leningrad, the capitals of all the union republics (Kyiv, Minsk, Tashkent, Chisinau, Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Baku, Yerevan, Tbilisi, Alma-Ata, Ashgabat, Frunze, Dushanbe), in large cities (Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Kharkov and so on), as well as in “closed” cities with a significant share of the defense industry (Sevastopol, Dnepropetrovsk, Kuibyshev), as well as within 120-km zone from the state border.

These prohibitions meant they could neither defect to the West by crossing the state border, and were effectively excluded from all social, cultural and intellectual interaction with intelligentsia of the big cities, thus being doomed to the dumbest existence possible.

In accordance to the Soviet laws, all political prisoners after release from Gulag were subject to these restrictions. According to Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, all members of the families of repressed were subject for expulsion from Moscow and Leningrad and other big cities and might only live beyond «101st kilometer» zone.

After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the gradual release of miliions of political prisoners that followed, the men and women who were set free from Gulag were also automatically subject to «101st kilometer» zone restrictions. Only after Khrushev’s critique against Stalin in 1956, small cohorts of those formerly repressed individuals started receiving permissions to return to their former places of dwelling, many of thos already occupied by new tenants.

During summer Olympic Games of 1980 “unreliable” individuals (so called “antisocial elements” - beggars, alcoholics and rowky) were also evicted from Moscow and Leningrad.

## Scope of 101st km area

101 kilometers were not interpreted strictly geometrically in the form of a circle within 101 km radius from the center on Red Square of Moscow. Some nearest towns where it was possible to live were either farther from that radius or maybe closer. Some of the notable towns close to Moscow where the dissdents might be getting permission to dwell included Aleksandrov - called the unofficial “capital of the 101st kilometer”, Tarusa, Orekhovo-Zuevo, Zaraysk, Balabanovo, Belousovo, Pokrov.

In each case, the 101st kilometer area for the certain repressed was specified individually. For example, in the passport of one of the surveyed within Harvard project there was a ban on accommodation “in large cities, Caucasus and in any industrial areas of the USSR».

## Notable people subject to 101st km restrictions

- Arkady Steinberg - poet, translator, painter
- Boris Sveshnikov - painter
- Lev Razgon - writer, human rights activist
- Larisa Bogoraz - human rights activist
- Gleb Yakunin - priest, human rights activist
- Andrey Amalrik - philosopher, human rights activist
- Felix Svetov - religious dissident, human rights activist

## In popular culture

- Song "101st kilometer" by the group "Lesopoval"
- Song "101st kilometer" by Alexander Rozenbaum
- Song "Kilimanjaro" by the group AveNue
- Play "Stars in the morning sky" by Alexander Galin
- Book “Kilometer 101” published in 2022 in English by Russian writer Maxim Osipov, formerly a cardiologist residing and working in Tarusa.

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