From Lenta.ru:

Putin postpones introduction of forced labour

The president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, has postponed the introduction of forced labour as a method of punishment for a year. As the Kremlin website reports, this form of punishment will be introduced from 2014. The corresponding law has been signed by the president.

Forced labour was introduced into the Russian criminal code in December 2011. It is supposed that this measure will allow courts to give punishments that do not involve the deprivation of personal freedom. Labour can last from two months to five years.

Forced labour will be the punishment for people who have committed offences of low to medium severity. In addition, forced labour could be the punishment for several offences where the offender broken the law for the first time.

While the law on forced labour was still being considered, MPs noted that in 2013 it would be impossible to introduce the punishment as a result of a lack of personnel.

According to the criminal executive code of the Russian Federation, those sentenced to forced labour will serve their punishment in special penal centres. Those sentenced will, as a rule, live out their sentences in dormitories at these centres.

Comments from Lenta.ru: Форум:

wdrug:

Well, it should have been introduced. Only, not for violent crimes.

okrug.info:

Let’s do it how Stalin did – send all politicians to work camps in Siberia, and the country can recover after being robbed. The first to go will be Udaltsov and Razvozzhayev, and then Limonov and Alekseyev and the other oppositionists after them. And then let’s gradually introduce slavery across the whole country and assign slaves to the land owners.

Where’s Mr. Right? (some things are better left unsaid):

In the USA, it’s called community labour, in Russia – forced. It sort of shows where democracy is.

Поручик Сивуха Ржевский:

Can you get 5 years of “community” labour in the USA?

Доберман:

“Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.” Churchill. On the sun setting on the British Empire.

kolya ishakov:

What a terrible word, dormitories.

All that is Soviet is slowly but surely returning, thanks to our wise leader.

Владимир: (responding to above)

The dormitories will be divided by comfort into 2, 3, 4, and 5 stars, maybe that’s why they haven’t managed to get it ready by 2013?

Kolobeshka:

Where’s my “moral code of the builder of communism” that’s been lying around? :D

andreenk:

Not enough personnel – have the Gulag employees already died?

bokasso: (responding to above)

They’ve already been frozen for a hundred years. ))) Now, the process of unfreezing is going well. )))

Сибиряк: