Article 58:10, "propaganda and agitation that called to overturn or undermining of the Soviet regime", was punishable with at least 6 months of imprisonment, up to and including the death sentence in periods of war or unrest.
[10] The 70th and 190th Articles of the Criminal Code concerning "slanderous fabrications that discredited the Soviet system" and "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" served as the formal basis to sentence Vladimir Bukovsky, Pyotr Grigorenko, Valeria Novodvorskaya, Zhores Medvedev, Andrei Amalrik and many dissidents to months and sometimes years of indefinite confinement in psychiatric institutions.
[11] On 19 February 1986, nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov in his letter to Mikhail Gorbachev wrote, "application by courts of Articles 70 and 190-1 is pronounced persecution for beliefs.
"[12]: 559 In 1990, a year before the very end of the Soviet regime, "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" was excluded from the Russian SFSR Criminal Code after the three decades of its application.
The terms "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" were replaced by "public appeals", "subversion" (podryv, подрыв) and "overthrow" (sverzheniye, свержение).
[13] In October 1992, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian law retained an offense of "public appeals to alter the constitutional order by force or to seize power, as well as the largescale distribution of material with such content", punishable by detention for a period of up to three years or a fine of twenty monthly minimum wages.
More recently, a retrogressive trend in amendments to existing laws led attorney Henri Reznik to raise the alarm about the appearance of the phrase "anti-Russian" in certain legislative proposals.