Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code)
Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to prosecute those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities.Penal codes of other republics of the Soviet Union also had articles of similar nature[citation needed].In effect, Article 58 was carte blanche for the secret police to arrest and imprison anyone deemed suspicious, making for its use as a political weapon.[citation needed] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago characterized the enormous scope of the article in this way: One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation.Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace?(An annotated account of every single case prosecuted under Article 58.10 of the Soviet Penal Code from the death of Stalin until the fall of Communism with reference to the relevant files in the State Archive of the Russian Federation [GARF] for researchers)