The Russian criminal justice system frequently comes under international scrutiny for serving the repressive goals of the government instead of actually offering justice. The most recent of these cases of injustice on political grounds – the imprisonment of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov in 2014 and of the members of the punk band Pussy Riot in 2012 – continue a long tradition of using incarceration to persecute the critics of the regime. However, these high-profile cases of political repression are only the tip of the iceberg: millions of ordinary Russians go through the penal system year after year. Their condition (both present-day and historical) is much less studied, and a comprehensive social history of the Russian penal system is long overdue. Analysing the regional variety and addressing the experience of “common criminals” (as opposed to political prisoners) is particularly important, as a wide gap has separated the reality of imprisonment from its picture created in the official documents. This work, however, is ongoing.
Central institutions of criminal justice, on the other hand, have been the subject of numerous scholarly works, and our understanding of them is fairly advanced. The book reviewed here proposes an overview of this ample literature and outlines the history of the Russian criminal justice system over the past 300 years. Writing an encompassing history of crime and punishment in less than 200 pages is an ambitious task. Jonathan Daly, professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, is perhaps one of the best-placed English-speaking academics to approach this subject: he is the author of two monographs on the tsarist security police and of multiple articles on, among other topics, political crime, policing, and perlustration.
Daly approaches the topic systematically by describing the criminal justice policies of the Russian state, meticulously reviewing the fundamental laws, and analysing the position of the judicial personnel. The narrative focuses on the institutional and legal dimension of criminal justice, but the research on the social and cultural aspects of the criminal justice system is also extensively quoted. Crime and Punishment in Russia provides an intensive introduction to a range of interrelated topics rather than an in-depth analysis, and it will be particularly useful for students and non-specialists in Russian history. The chronological list of events, maps, and organizational charts, for example, allow readers to orient themselves in this long time period and will be of great help to anyone embarking on independent research on the topic.
The author masters the historiography, and, despite its brevity, his analysis of the laws is perceptive, as well as skilfully buttressed by the numerous references to the studies on Russian politics, social issues, military history, and culture. Daly has organized his book chronologically into seven chapters, starting with Peter the Great and ending with the third term of Vladimir Putin. Each chapter opens with a short overview of the political situation of the period and reconnects the legislation with the chief characteristics of the consecutive regimes. In his conclusion, Daly discusses the key features that continuously defined criminal justice in Russia, namely “arbitrariness, informal rules, personalized decision-making, and treating mere threats to state authority as graver offenses than bodily harm to private individuals”. He concludes that “the actual path followed [by Russia] was one mostly of continuity” (p. 184).
This concise and professional book has many merits and would be a helpful companion to a course on the Russian criminal justice system, but it also has a number of problems. The first issue is its title, which is somewhat misleading. For a reader attracted by the comparative dimension, this book might be disappointing. Comparisons are illustrative rather than systematic, and the comparative methodology is not explained. For instance, writing about the abolition of torture in the Russian empire in 1801, Daly mentions that an official in China was against abolition as late as 1905 (p. 36). This is an interesting detail, but this is the only point in the book when the history of Chinese punishments appears. “The West”, on the other hand, is frequently present as the point of reference. Unfortunately, “the West” is presented as an unproblematic, coherent entity. For a long time, such an approach was commonplace in both Russian and non-Russian language historiography, but with the advance of global history in recent decades this shibboleth has lost its last appeal. Comparisons between various periods of Russian history are also not quite systematic. For instance, noting without any commentary that “the era of Russian history that early Bolshevism most resembled was the time of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible” (p. 80) feels like a simile rather than a fully fledged historical comparison.
The author misses many opportunities to problematize his central notions. What was considered crime at different moments of time? How did definitions change over time? Similarly, he does not include the sociological perspective on crime and punishment. There exists, for example, ample literature on the emergence of the concept of hooliganism – both in Russia and globally – that allows us to see how the definitions of crime were shifting and changing under the pressures of modern moral panics about unmotivated violence among the “lower classes”. The author, unfortunately, does not add this dimension to his discussion of this crime (pp. 73–74).
Another unfortunate decision made by the author is that instead of presenting a variety of scholarly perspectives that sometimes contradict and sometimes complement each other, he largely relies uncritically on one perspective. A disciple of the late Richard Pipes, Jonathan Daly belongs to the tradition of the historical study of Russia through the Cold War lens, and although he has sought to update some of the classical theses of the “cold warriors”,Footnote 1 this book remains strongly embedded within the same tradition. For example, Russia's backwardness is taken for granted and serves as the sole explanation of many developments. In the preface, Daly asks: “How can one explain historically both the striking harshness and humanity of Russia's criminal justice system over the past three centuries?” (p. x). Unfortunately, this question remains unanswered in the conclusion. While the striking harshness is explained by the continuity of Russian history, the humanity of the criminal justice system remains neglected.
Nevertheless, this rich, well-paced, and systematic book will be helpful to many students and teachers of Russian history. As it relies primarily on the historiography rather than primary research, it also highlights the issues of the current scholarship of Russian history. Politics, and especially politics in the capitals, continues to be the focus of much research; this is visible not only in the persistent need for regional and transregional studies, but also in the relentless fascination with political prisoners. Moreover, it is also still clear that Russian studies (and this is particularly clear in the case of the history of criminal justice) remain largely within the confines of area studies. Some important work that reconnects Russian punishments to the global history of punishments and repression has already been done, but this line of investigation requires the efforts of many more historians.
