Freedom, Labour, and Money. Fines in post-revolutionary Russia 1919-1929

• In Event: Alternative Justice: Then and Now

Abstract

The paper analyses the ideological justification and practice related to the penal fine in the initial years of the Soviet regime in Russia. This period is particularly interesting for several reasons: On the one hand, it is the moment of the search for a revolutionary law, when loyalty to the Revolution was considered to be above any concept of law as such, but at the same time new codes were drafted which were essentially modelled after the Western European ones, a fact that can explain the striking coincidences between classical and neoclassical criticism against fines and the Soviet ones; on the other hand, it also answers why after the punitive turn in the Stalinist penal policy of the 1930s the fine was one of the first victims, in line with the practical, but also symbolic role it played in the previous decade as a fundamental mechanism for the construction of a more lenient criminal system. As we will see, the Soviet penal practice before 1929 should not be considered a mere stage in the development of the gulags, but a sharp break from what came later. The perfect example of this is the regulation and practice of the penal fine.

Author

• Patricia Faraldo-Cabana, University of A Coruña, Spain