Russians who leave the country and support Ukraine should be sent to gulags in Siberia if they ever return home, Moscow State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

While the exact number of Russians who have left the country since the war in Ukraine began last year is unknown, it is believed to be in the hundreds of thousands, as President Vladimir Putin’s decree of “partial” mobilization in September 2022 led to a real exodus of men from Russia.

More than a year and a half after the start of the war, Russia has become a much darker place: the last dissidents have been jailed, state television and high-ranking officials in Moscow regularly talk about nuclear Armageddon, and some Russian politicians are proposing measures that cut through the absurd.

State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said at the plenary session of the parliament on Tuesday that people who left Russia and enjoyed Ukrainian drones and missiles in their native country should know that they are not waiting for them back home.

“Those who left the country and committed abominations, enjoying shooting on the territory of the Russian Federation, hoping for the victory of the bloody Nazi regime in Kyiv, should realize that no one is waiting for them here,” he thundered.

“But if they return, Magadan will be available to them,” Volodin added, using the name of the region, which in Russia is synonymous with dictator Joseph Stalin’s Gulag system.

About 800,000 people are believed to have passed through the gulags in the Magadan region of the Russian Far East between 1932, 7 years before the founding of the city of the same name, which is now the administrative center of the region, and the mid-1950s.

Gulags are again in the center of public attention in Russia

In total, about 18 million people passed through the Soviet Gulag system, immortalized by the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who survived the deportation to Siberia. His seminal book The Gulag Archipelago was banned in the Soviet Union after its publication in the West in 1973.

An MP from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party earlier this year called for Gulag Archipelago to be banned again in the country, saying works that “demean and smear Russia” should be banned from Russian schools.

But despite his experience of Soviet totalitarianism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a staunch supporter of Putin until the writer’s death in 2008 at the age of 89, while the Kremlin leader expressed admiration for his literary work. In 2009, Putin’s government made this book compulsory reading for 16- and 17-year-old students in high school.

Regarding Vyacheslav Volodin’s comments on Tuesday, a full transcript of his speech was published on the State Duma’s Telegram channel, prompting mixed reactions from Russians who use the messaging app.

Some agreed and urged Russian politicians to move from talk to action. Others, however, were rather amused by his statements.

For example, in an anonymous response to the post of the State Duma, it is said that the Magadan region may not be able to cope with such a massive influx of people, and those who will be sent here may be involved in the construction of a new city.

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