The social, economic, and human background of Soviet criminal justice and its actual administration, based on published records and firsthand observation in Russia.

"According to official Soviet propaganda, crime is an adjunct of capitalism and has virtually disappeared in the Soviet Union; whatever crimes are committed are attributed to survivals of capitalism sixty years after the Revolution. As a result, crime statistics are hard to come by, and even legal scholars cannot always get access to court records. Nevertheless, Soviet dissident Valery Chalidze, using whatever records he was able to find and drawing on previous conversations with informed individuals in the USSR, here presents a side of the Soviet Union not previously covered in books on the subject. His object is to fill some of the gaps that exist in the outside world's knowledge of the USSR, but he also confesses that "I have always been fascinated by the customs and personalities of Russian criminals," and he begins with the centuries-old Russian criminal tradition--the attitude, often of tolerance, toward various kinds of crime that no later history has been able to erase completely. He covers the use made of the criminal underworld by the Bolsheviks during their rise to power and the later split between the underworld and the new regime. And he discusses in some detail recent murders, rapes, thefts and the all-prevailing 'hooliganism' (acts of random violence, often while drunk) that accounts for a vast majority of court cases today. Finally he turns to such peculiarly Soviet crimes as 'private enterprise' and 'entrepreneurism.'" -- Provided by publisher

The first comprehensive account of Stalin's struggle to make criminal law in the USSR a reliable instrument of rule offers new perspectives on collectivization, the Great Terror, the politics of abortion, and the disciplining of the labor force.

Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses. In Khrushchev's Cold Summer Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system. Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.

There is no better key to the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet social system than Soviet law. Here in English translation is the Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure of the largest of the fifteen Soviet Republics--containing the basic criminal law of the Soviet Union and virtually the entire criminal law applicable in Russia--and the Law on Court Organization. These two codes and the Law, which went into effect o January 1, 1961, are among the chief products of the Soviet law reform movement which began after Stalin's death, and are a concrete reflection of the effort to establish legality and prevent a return to Stalinist arbitrariness and terror. In a long introductory essay Harold Berman, a leading authority on Soviet law, stresses the extent to which the codes are expressed in authentic soviet legal language, based in part on the pre-Revolutionary Russian past but oriented to Soviet concepts, conditions, and policies. He outlines the historical background of the new codes, with a detailed listing of the major changes reflected in them, interprets their significance, places them within the system of Soviet law as a whole, and discusses some of the principal similarities and differences between Soviet criminal law and procedure and that of Western Europe and of the United States.