Law and Legality I: Crime and the Courts in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel explores the investigative and judicial institutions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and their wider influence over politics, society, and the economy. The reforms of the 1860s created new courts based on principles of judicial autonomy, openness, and adversariality. These courts emerged as protected spaces where political argument and opposition to the autocracy could find public expression. But the wider effect of the new legal culture was to frame the revolutionary movement in constitutional terms as the defence of natural rights and freedoms. In the 1960s, the investigations conducted by the KGB into the shadow economy demonstrated the powers but also the limitations of the state’s ability to understand and combat economic crime, with implications for the subsequent growth of the shadow economy. The papers thus each frame the state’s investigation and prosecution of crime as windows onto wider dynamics in imperial and Soviet history.

This panel is part of a themed series on Law and Legality.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Rhiannon Dowling, CUNY Lehman College

Papers

• The Russian Jury Trial in the Age of the Great Reforms: 1866-1882 - Sergei Antonov, Yale U

• Revolutionaries, Constitutionalism, and the Courts after the Great Reforms - Daniel Beer, Royal Holloway, U of London (UK)

• The KGB Investigates the Soviet Shadow Economy in the 1960s - James W. Heinzen, Rowan U

Discussant

• Sharon A. Kowalsky, East Texas A&M U