In January 1949, Krasin and some friends were arrested by the KGB and sentenced to eight years in labor camps for criticizing Marxism–Leninism.

In 1950 Krasin was transferred to the Kolyma region in the USSR Ear east, in the Berlag labor camp.

Many miners became deadly sick in one year because of silicosis, but Krasin was registered as a turner and worked the rest of his term in the mechanical shops.

After Stalin's death, in October 1954, Krasin and the others who were arrested in 1949 were brought back to Moscow, released and rehabilitated.

At this time Krasin started self-publishing: he took photographs and gave friends uncensored books to read.

While he was in exile he was informed that in June 1971 his friend and participating rights activist Nadezhda Pavlovna Yemel'kin was arrested for demonstrating alone on Pushkin Square holding up a banner "Freedom to Political Prisoners in the USSR."

After the RSFSR Supreme Court overturned Krasin's verdict in autumn 1971 he went to the town of Yeniseisk where she was in exile and married her.

[5] On September 12, 1973, two weeks after Krasin's trial, the United States Senate adopted a resolution which was an appeal to President Richard Nixon to demand that the Soviet government stop repression of the participants of the human rights movement in the USSR.

It was stated in this resolution that Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin had "demonstrated enormous courage and intellectual honesty in advocating and defending the importance of fundamental civil and political liberty.

[8] Krasin was interviewed by the New York Times Magazine and a cover article was published called "How I Was Broken by the K.G.B."