Brezhnev’s Son-in-Law Getting VIP Treatment in Labor Camp

MOSCOW â€”  Accustomed to all the luxuries of life, Yuri M. Churbanov, the disgraced son-in-law of the late Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev, reportedly has had to give up only his Adidas jogging suit since entering the prison camp where he is to serve a 12-year sentence for corruption.

Churbanov, once the Soviet Union’s first deputy interior minister, has not done a day’s work since he was incarcerated in Labor Camp No. 12 near the city of Nizhny-Tagil in the Ural Mountains, the newspaper Socialist Industry reported Wednesday.

Since arriving at the camp in late February, Churbanov has been on the camp’s sick list, suspected of possibly having tuberculosis, although subsequent tests showed he did not. Prison physicians had already ruled out virtually any work except in the kitchen or library, the newspaper reported.

Churbanov, visited by a correspondent for Socialist Industry, is “occupying the best private isolation ward in the camp sanatorium,� the correspondent said. “He did not look seriously ill at all, but was lying on his bed reading a novel.�

Churbanov, 52, was sentenced to 12 years under a “strict regime� for having accepted the equivalent of more than $150,000 in bribes for protecting widespread fraud in the cotton industry in Soviet Central Asia. Apparently the only sign of strictness, Socialist Industry reported, was the camp commandant’s order for Churbanov to surrender his jogging suit.

The camp, which Churbanov used to supervise as first deputy interior minister, is reserved for former high Communist Party, government, military and police officials, who are separated from the general prison population to protect them from possible attacks by other inmates.

As a result, Labor Camp No. 12 appears to offer a better diet than most free Soviet citizens have, according to the paper, and its shop is better stocked than most city stores.

“For the long-term prisoner, every incidental is important,� Socialist Industry commented. “The Ministry of Internal Affairs clearly understands this extremely well, and for that reason it sent the accused here.�

Were it not for a last-minute schedule change, Churbanov would have visited the camp in 1983 as first deputy interior minister, and other inmates recalled how they had spent days cleaning the camp for him.

Wholesale Corruption

Churbanov, who was the country’s second-ranking police official from 1980 to 1984, was convicted along with six co-defendants, also former high-ranking police officials, for running an elaborate system of bribes, payoffs and cover-ups to protect a multibillion-dollar scheme defrauding the government for cotton that was never grown, let alone delivered, for fields that were never cleared and irrigation systems that were never built.

The case effectively put on trial the Brezhnev Era--an 18-year period now known as the “era of stagnation�--for the wholesale corruption that it tolerated and even fostered in lieu of political and economic change.

Churbanov, married to Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, was portrayed during the four-month trial--and in often lurid press accounts of his life style--as a man of minimal talent but vast ambition whose rapid ascent was due, first, to Brezhnev’s patronage and, second, to his own willingness to “make a deal� with almost anyone.