The Criminal Justice System in Soviet Russia and the USSR (1917–1953): Emergence, Development and Transfer to the Lithuanian SSR (original) (raw)

The Re-birth of Soviet Criminal Law in Post-Soviet Russia

Russian Law Journal, 2017

Unlike some other Soviet Codes, first acts of the Bolshevist Criminal law were not modeled after the pre-revolutionary imperial codes. In the early Soviet criminal legislation, key juridical categories were replaced by sociological categories. The Marxist-Leninist principle of supremacy of interests of the state over the interests of an individual was envisaged on the legislative level and became a fundamental principle of the Soviet criminal law: crimes against the state were made the gravest ones, and the punishment for these crimes was much heavier than for all other crimes. The principle of analogy allowed criminal prosecution even in the cases, where the offence was not stipulated in the Criminal Code. In 1930s, the trend towards criminal repression intensified. Big changes, including the restoration of the traditional vocabulary of criminal law, the limitation of the doctrine of analogy, the careful analysis of crime in terms of subject and object, took place in the Soviet criminal legislation in 1960, when the new Criminal Code of the RSFSR was adopted. 1990s saw the long-awaited humanization and modernization of Russian criminal law, but situation started to change after the turn of the millennium. Certain cases as well as recently passed pieces of the Russian legislation show the sings of old Soviet attitudes in contemporary Russian criminal law and law enforcement.

Crime and Punishment in Russia

The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, 2015

This article discusses the punitive policy of the Russian Tsarist government in the early 20 th century as a result of the confrontation between the authorities and the revolutionary forces. Following Michel Foucault's argument, the starting point of this study is that the prison reflects the society and the changes within it. Authoritarianism in late imperial society was not left unchallenged. In the course of the Great Reforms of Alexander II, the prison reform played an important role. The reduction of the number of prisoners and the gradual improvement in the conditions of their detention was interrupted by events that began during the First Russian Revolution of 1905. Under its shadow, the revolutionary movement awoke and activated all kind of crime. The result was a large increase in the number of inmates in Russian prisons. However, a series of unfortunate circumstances, such as an epidemic, the First World War and the last two of the revolutions finally undermined the Russian penitentiary system that was still in the making. The paper applies a holistic approach to the Russian penitentiary system. It utilizes a broad range of sources ranging from legislator memorandums and reports of officials of the Tsarist prison administration to expert opinions published in special journals. It also uses statistical data for quantitative analysis to contextualize separate features in the prison system. Analysis of not only historical and political development in the late Imperial Russia but also of philosophical and legal concepts makes this research a multidisciplinary study.

CRIME AND LAW AFTER SOVIET REVOLUTION. THE CASE OF PASHUKANIS

Eastern Academic Journal, vol 3, pp 1-5., 2019

Evgeny Pashukanis was an imaginative Marxist, the most imaginative to appear among Soviet scientists of law immediately after the October Revolution. For Westerners Pashukanis works have a fascination, because they trace the evolution of his thought as he tried to bring to bear his sense of what was needed programmatically upon the doctrines as he understood them. In the present we outline the importance of a question confronted but unanswered in Pashukanis' project (and unaddressed, in our time). How, precisely, are we to understand the historical configuration of state and law in social formations where capitalist property has been abolished but where communism has by no means yet been achieved? How are we to resolve the apparent paradox that the legal practices of most, if not all, social formations dominated by the political rule of the proletariat have included the form, and very often the content, of the legal rules typically associated with capitalist models of production?

Lessons from the Terror: Soviet Prosecutors and Police Violence in Molotov Province, 1942 to 1949

Slavic Review, 2019

State prosecutors played a central role in the exercise of state power during the Stalinist dictatorship. On the one hand, in the show trials of the 1930s, prosecutors orchestrated the public performance of terror. They provided legitimacy to a system of steered political justice, while signing off on hundreds of thousands of troiki-cases during the mass operations. On the other hand, they were prosecuting millions of non-political cases in regular court proceedings. Their “supervision” (nadzor) task instructed prosecutors to detect and to fight any given legal violation in the Soviet Union committed by individuals or state agencies, appointing the prosecutor (prokuror) as a major tool for combat against arbitrary action within the Soviet state. The procuracy (prokuratura) both sustained mass terror and enforced legal rules in the realms of criminal justice. The Soviet prosecutor is thus a key figure for understanding the correlation of arbitrariness and consistency in the framework of Stalinist rule. This article will elaborate on this correlation and examine the prosecutors’ role in the Stalinist dictatorship by presenting a biographical case study from the Soviet periphery. Dmitrii Nikolaevich Kuliapin was the main prosecutor of the Molotov region from 1942–49. On the basis of his party records, the minutes from prosecutors’ meetings and the correspondences between the militsiia and procuracy in the Molotov province, the paper will shed light on the routines of criminal prosecution and supervision, Kuliapin’s professional ambitions, and on his attempts to prevent and to punish police violence by militsiia officials. Kuliapin’s story, and especially his struggle with the police, reveals both the prosecutors’ aspirations and abilities to enforce rules in the Stalinist state and in the realm of its policies. It exemplifies the institutional clash between prosecutors and the militsiia as a conflict between two competing approaches of Stalinist rule, in which the prosecutors’ approach did eventually prevail.

Controlling Revolution: Understandings of Violence through the Rural Soviet Courts, 1917–1923

Europe-Asia Studies, 2013

This essay is a study of how Soviet jurists and rural citizens attempted to understand and control illicit social violence during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath in the rural courts. It examines how Soviet leaders, people's courts and criminologists understood the role of the courts in controlling violence and how decisions of local courts actually limited the effects of the violence of revolution and civil war. It underscores the complexity of violence and the need to understand state and peasant attempts to control social violence in an age marked by political, state violence.