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Criminalization and Decriminalization in Soviet Criminal Policy, 1917-1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Peter H. Solomon Jr.
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Abstract

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In the early and mid-1920's Soviet courts were overwhelmed with new criminal business, prompting Bolshevik leaders to transfer most cases of petty crime away from the courts either to administrative proceedings or to lay bodies (comrades' courts and village social courts). This article examines the Bolshevik experiment in decriminalization and diversion—its causes, its politics, and its consequences both for the courts and for the alternatives to them. The crisis of congestion in early Soviet courts resulted neither from a growth in actual criminal behavior nor from prosecution of new crimes devised by the Bolsheviks. It owed its origin to the elimination after the Revolution of various extrajudicial mechanisms used by the Tsars for handling infractions, thereby producing a criminalization of traditional misdeeds. The subsequent adoption by Soviet leaders of a policy of decriminalization followed careful study, and despite the turbulent times bore the mark of rational decision making. And the policy was implemented; a large number of cases were shifted first to administrative processing by police officials and then to lay tribunals, especially to the village social courts, which proved more viable than the comrades' courts which were established in factories. But the waves of diversion did not relieve court congestion, as in each instance new sorts of cases replaced those moved away. The experience tended to confirm the thesis that the amount of crime prosecuted in a society is a function of the capacity of its criminal justice institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , 1982 , pp. 9 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

This paper is derived in part from research conducted while the author was a fellow of the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C., and it was prepared for presentation at the Second World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies, Garmisch, Germany, October, 1980.

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