Understanding the History of Soviet Criminal Justice: The Contribution of Archives and Other Sources

Abstract

On the basis of the author's research (and to a lesser extent that of other scholars), this paper argues that for constructing the history of Soviet criminal justice archives served mainly as a supplement to rather than substitute for printed sources and oral history. Archives were more important for the postwar decade, 1946–55, when the quality of printed sources reached a low point. Overall, archival sources provided special insights into decision‐making in criminal policy and the role of Stalin; statistics on the work of the justice agencies (including campaigns and the implementation of new laws); secret laws and decrees; and documents on the management of the penal system. Major findings to which archival sources contributed include the difficulties implementing extreme measures initiated by Stalin (extensions of the law and severe punishments) because of resistance of officials to them; the abandonment in the mid‐1930s of the practice of running legal institutions with uneducated trustees in favor of trained legal officials making careers and the way their work came to be evaluated; the extent of dysfunctions in the administration of justice before Stalin's death; and the seriousness of attempts at reform in the first years of Khrushchev's rule.

Field Research on Law in Conflict Zones and Authoritarian States

“…History-of people, the events they shape and that shape them, and the politics surrounding their interactions with one another-is central to people's encounters with and stories of law (see, e.g., Mawani 2012). Linking the ethnographic present with the historical past paints a more vivid, grounded, and contextualized picture of law's claims to authority, particularly in places with turbulent colonial and postcolonial histories (see, e.g., Nordstrom 2002, p. 4;Sachs 2013;Solomon 2015). Archival research may involve collecting texts or compiling descriptive statistics using official data (see, e.g., Massoud 2013, pp.…”

Introduction

“…Rendle's article also urges historians to take revolutionary justice seriously. Recent years have seen some important archival studies examine the practice and culture of law in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, but there remains a tendency to ignore law as something irrelevant amidst the violence of revolution and civil war. Justice versus terror was, as Douds demonstrates, a contentious issue from the October Revolution onwards, and terror got the upper hand after the departure of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, but there remained a vibrant debate over revolutionary justice demonstrating its continued importance to the state.…”

Resisting Multiple Narratives of Law in Transition Countries: Russia and Beyond

“… 19 See Solomon (2015a, 2015b) for an overview of the ways in which the opening of the archives has deepened our understanding of Soviet criminal justice. …”