Below the radar of legal code. Extra-judicial, administrative punishment for social and political deviance in Soviet Union 1917-1953.
Final Report Abstract
The project has shown that the Soviet party-state developed a new type of system aimed at combating social and political deviance as soon as it arose, illegally, by extrajudicial and administrative means. The system served to act below the legal code. On the one hand, social networks and communalization beyond the state and party in the pre-political, noninstitutionalized space were to be recorded and neutralized and, on the other hand, the parallel social worlds of unorganized crime, contacts with the criminal milieu, hooliganism, begging, loitering, the unemployed, illegal workers, unlicensed persons, smugglers, black market traders, border violators and other minor social deviants. Service offenses should also be included. The focus on combating the milieu and structural control was not intended to moderate power or to protect or supplement the socialist legal system. On the contrary, in the name of social defence and the creation of loyalty, the aim was to systematically expand the state's powers of intervention beyond areas relevant to criminal law on the basis of a purely administrative act. The focus was on generating loyalty, even to the point of “cadaver obedience”, and not on combating crime. In terms of administrative history, the project analysed how the extrajudicial system was structured and functioned. It also documented its changes in the period 1922-1953.
Publications
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The Origins of Stalin’s Mass Operations. The Secret Police and the Soviet System, 24-47. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Junge, Marc; Savin, Andrei & Tepliakov, Aleksei
