REPORT ON TRENDS IN SOVIET CRIMINAL LAW, STATE PEI FY 87/88 TASK 1 RESULTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90M00551R001700940001-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 140
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 26, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: August 11, 1988
• Content Type: MEMO

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-OA 131,Riiii
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Intelligence Producers Council
Washington, D.C. 20505
12 AIM 1"9
IPC 7532/88
11 August 1988
eew
MEMORANDUM FOR: Members, Intelligence Producers Council
FROM:
Chief, Intelligence Producers Council Staff
SUBJECT: Report on Trends in Soviet Criminal Law,
State PEI FY 87/88 Task 1 Results
1. In FY 1987, the Council approved a State Department PEI titled
Analysis of Soviet Legal Trends Under Gorbachev. This effort recieved
divided between FYs 1987 and 1988. The attached report is the result
of task 1 of this effort. The report is provided for your information and use
as appropriate.
2. We will disseminate additional reports for this and other PEI efforts
as we receive them. If you require any additional information relating to the
PEI program please let me know.
Attachment
---CiArThEN-T-LAL
25X1
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25X1
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IPC 7532/88
SUBJECT: Report on Trends in Soviet Criminal Law, State PEI
FY 87/88 Task 1 Results
Distribution:
1 - Maj Gen Frank B. Horton III, USAF
1 - RADM Charles F. Clark, USN
1 - RADM Thomas A. Brooks, USN
1 - BGen James D. Beans, USMC
1 - LTG Sidney T. Weinstein, USA
1 - Maj Gen C. Norman Wood, USAF
1 - Chmn/NIC
1 - J. J. Guenther/USMC
1 - Edward Dandar/AIA
1 - Col. Evan H. Parrott, USAF
1 - VChmn/NIC
1 - Richard Haver/Navy
1 - NSA
1 -
1 -
1 -
1 -
DDR&E/ICS
DIA/DB
DI AIDE
Assoc.General Counsel for
Intell. Comm. Affairs/OGC/CIA
1 - C/SE/DDO/CIA
1 - D/EURA/DDI/CIA
1 - C/SOVA/DDI/CIA
1 - D/OGI/DDI/CIA
1 - C/DSD/OIR/DDI/CIA
1 - C/ILS/CPAS/DDI/CIA
1 - IPC Subject File
1 - IPC Chrono File
1 - ICS Registry
IPC,
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(11 Aug 88) 25X1
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CONFIDENTIAL
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4 1 Oh? 414
United States Department of State
Washington, D.C. 20520
TO: See Attached Distribution List
FROM: INR/RES - Dallas Lloyd
SUBJECT: Report on Trends in Soviet Crimimal Law
July 21, 1988
Attached is a copy of an external research study
entitled "Changes in the Soviet Criminal Law System Under
Gorbachev." It was prepared by Professor Peter Maggs,
University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, as fulfillment
of Task 1 of a larger on-going project on Soviet legal
trends under Gorbachev. This project was designed by
analysts in the Office of Analysis for the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe (INR/SEE), and is being jointly
monitored by SEE and RES. It is being supported with
funds awarded to SEE under the Production Enhancement
Initiative (PEI) program managed by the Intelligence
Producers Council Staff.
If you would like to have a copy of the appendix. to
the attached report please call me on 632-1955.
Attachment:
As stated.
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DISTRIBUTION LIST: "Changes in the Soviet Criminal Law
System Under Gorbachev"
Embassy Moscow
INR/RES
INR/AMR
INR/EC
,INR/SIO
INR/SEE
EUR
EUR/SOV
FAIM/LR
CIA/SOVA
DIA
DIAC
FBIS/AG
IPC Staff
- Mr. Mark Ramee
Mr.
Ms.
Mr.
Mr.
Mr.
Mr.
Mx.
Mr.
Mr.
Mr.
E. Raymond Platig
Susan Nelson
Don Graves
John Danylyk
Robert Baraz
John Sontag
Paul Goble
Thomas W. Simons, Jr.
Alexander Vershbow
Dan Clemmer
r'
STAT
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CHANGES IN THE SOVIET CRIMINAL LAW SYSTEM UNDER GORBACHEV*
by Peter B. Maggs
Task 1 Report Under Contract 1724-720082
March 30, 1987
Submitted by:
Research and writing was supported under United Sates
Department of State Contract No. 1724-720082. The opinions,
findings, and/or conclusions herein herein are solely those of
Peter B. Maggs and are not officially endorsed by the Department
of State.
STAT
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CHANGES IN THE SOCIET CRIMINAL LAW SYSTEM UNDER GORBACHEV
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Gorbachev period has been a time of much more publicity
about the criminal law system, of increased discussion of
possible change in the system, and of numerous changes in the
system. By quantity, by far the largest number of changes in
criminal legislation have been of types consistent with Brezhnev-
era policies. These are in the area of corrections, technical
law reform, and application of criminal law to new social
problems. Three major criminal law "campaigns" begun under
Andropov and Chernenko have been continued but gradually wound
down under Gorbachev. These were the campaigns against
corruption in the police, in the trade distribution network, and
among officials. Four areas of change in criminal law reflect
distinctly new policies of the Gorbachev regime. These involve
the treatment of dissidents, the rehabilitation of victims of
Stalin's purges, the reinstatement of acquittals, and the use of
criminal law in the anti-alcohol campaign. The politically most
significant new policy has been the early release of many persons
convicted of slandering the Soviet state and the tolerance of
speech activities that would have led to swift criminal
prosecution under Gorbachev's predecessors. Also politically
significant has been the high publicity given to the
rehabilitation of victims of Stalin's purges, most notably the
rehabilitation of Bukharin.
The most significant development ia
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criminal procedure has been the start of a move away from the
practice, which had developed under Brezhnev, whereby the courts
did not acquit innocent defendants, but rather continually
remanded their cases for further investigation or convicted them
of minor offenses. The years 1986 and 1987 saw a huge expansion
in the number of alcohol-related criminal convictions, followed
by the decriminalization of most alcohol-related offenses,
perhaps because of the overload they were placing on the criminal
justice system.
11
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PRELIMINARY NOTES
1. This Report is submitted in fulfillment of Task 1 of Contract
1724-720082. Task 1 reads:
A report shall be prepared identifying where possible
dramatic changes have taken place in the criminal
justice system. These changes may include the
penalties, treatment of offenders, and total number of
the incarcerated. Identify possible widespread social
consequences that have developed as public perceptions
of personal risk under the law enforcement system
respond to change.
2. This report will be updated in the Consolidation Report to be
submitted in connection with Task 5 of the Contract.
111
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CHANGES IN THE SOVIET CRIMINAL LAW SYSTEM UNDER GORBACHEV
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction 1
II. Movement of Power Up from the Province and
Republic Levels to Moscow ' 9
A. Introduction 9
B. Cleaning Up Law Enforcement Agencies 11
1. Introduction 11
2. Judges 12
3. Procurators 13
4. Police 15
a. Introduction 15
b. Taking Bribes to Overlook
Criminal Activity 16
c. Covering Up Crime Due to Influence
from Local Authorities 17
d. Refusing to Register Complaints of
Hard-to-Solve Crimes 18
e. "Solving" Crimes by "Framing" an
Innocent Person 18
f. Torture 19
5. Psychiatrists 19
6. The Phaseout of the Anticorruption Campaign 21
C. Preventing Party Protectionism 21
D. Purging Corrupt Local Officials 30
1. Introduction 30
iv
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2. Central Asia
a. Kazakhstan
b. Uzbekistan
32
32
32
3. The Caucasus
33
4. The Slavic Provinces
34
a. Rostov
34
b. Krasnodar Trade Cleanup
34
5. Moscow
34
a. The Trade Distribution System
34
b. The Foreign Trade Establishment
35
6. Miscellaneous ,
36
III.
Movement of Power Down from the Oblast'
and Republic Levels to Low Level
Officials and the Public
37
A.
Reducing Local Party Control of Local
Law Enforcement Officials
37
B.
Protecting Whistleblowers
39
1. Protecting Whistleblowers from Unjustified
Psychiatric Commitment
43
IV.
Exposing and Treating the Sore Spots in Soviet Society
45
A.
Introduction
45
B.
Illegal Alcohol Production and Distribution
45
C.
Drugs
48
D.
Prostitution
50
E.
Spreading AIDS
50
F.
Videopiracy
52
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G.
The Economy
53
H.
Blackmarketeering
57
I.
Disastrous Accidents
59
J.
Military Discipline
59
K.
State Security
59
L.
Juvenile Crime
60
V.
Amnesties and Rehabilitation
60
VI.
Applying Social Science Findings to Penal Policy
64
A.
Introduction
64
B.
The 1985 Amendments
65
C.
The 1987 Amendments
66
VII.
Proposed Social Science Based Corrections Law Reform
67
VIII.
Statistics on Crime
70
A.
General Trends in Criminal Convictions
70
B.
Specific Types of Crime
73
1. Crimes Against the State
73
2. Religious Offenses
73
3. Crimes of Violence
73
4. Theft Crimes
a. Theft of State and other "Socialist"
74
Property
74
b. Theft of Other Property
75
5. "Hooliganism"
76
6. Election Fraud
76
7. Criminal Traffic Violations
76
8. Home Distilling
76
r
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IX.
X.
9. Labor Camp Population
10. The Death Penalty
Plans for Technical Law Reform
Liberal Law Reform?
77
77
79
81
A.
Introduction
81
B.
? Dissidents
81
C.
Homosexual Conduct
84
D.
Jury System
85
E.
Activating the Role of People's Assessors
86
F.
Judicial Robes
86
G.
Acquittals
86
H.
Remove Investigators from Procurator's Office
87
Defense Counsel Participation
87
J.
Improving the Status of the Bar
88
K.
Better Review
89
L.
Death Penalty
89
M.
Publication of Statistics
90
XI.
Increased Investment in the Criminal Justice System?
91
A.
Introduction
91
B.
Ending Correspondence Legal Education
91
C.
More Elegant Courthouses
92
D.
Orienting Labor Camps Toward Reform Rather
Than Plan Fulfillment
92
XII.
THE FUTURE
93
NOTES
95
vii
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CHANGES IN THE SOVIET CRIMINAL LAW SYSTEM UNDER GORBACHEV
I. 'Introduction
The Gorbachev period has been a time of much more
about the criminal law system, of increased discussion
possible change in the system, and of numerous changes
publicity
of
in the
system. It is useful to classify changes in the Soviet criminal
law system under Gorbachev into three main categories: those
that are consistent with Brezhnev-era policies;
consistent with Andropov-Chernenko era policies,
Brezhnev-era
policies and
policies; those that mark a return
a move away from Andropov-Chernenko
those that reflect new policies of the Gorbachev
those that
though not
to Brezhnev
policies;
period.
By quantity, by far the largest number of changes in
criminal legislation have been of types
era policies. These are in the area of
law reform, and application of criminal
are
with
and
consistent with Brezhnev-
corrections, technical
law to new social
problems. Serious sociological research into the effectiveness
of various forms of sentencing into the rehabilitation of
criminals developed under Brezhnev. The results of this research
led to a number of changes in corrections policy in the Brezhnev
years. As further sociological findings were made, further
changes were made in corrections policy under Andropov-Chernenko,
and Gorbachev. While the rules of punishment have changed, the
principle being applied is the same that was developed under
Brezhnev, namely that corrections policy should be guided by
scientific sociological findings. Legal measures for the
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segregation of juvenile offenders from hardened criminals and
measures for the sentencing of first offenders to penal
settlements rather than labor camps are not examples of sudden
liberalism under Gorbachev, but are a continuation of the policy
of treating corrections as a technical rather than political
issue. Under this policy, punishment may be made lighter or
harsher, depending upon the results of sociological studies. A
perfect example of the continuation of Brezhnev policy was the
announcement in 1987 that the punishments of exile and banishment
would be abolished. Hailed in the Western press as a sign of
liberalization under Gorbachev, the abolishment of exile and
banishment actually involved making punishment more severe
because sociological findings have shown that the less severe
punishment was not working. No longer will criminals be exiled
from their home cities but be left free to roam about most of the
country, nor will they be banished to specific remote localities
without any provision for supervision. Instead, they will be
sent to specific remote localities, where they will be forced to
work at designated jobs under formal supervision. The punishment
of exile and banishment will be replaced by the significantly
harsher, punishment of compulsory assignment to work in a remote
locality.
Technical law reform flourished under Brezhnev in many areas
of the law. Large bodies of legislation were codified or
recodified. A project was put in motion to publish a Collection
of Laws (Svod zakonov), for the first time since Speransky's 1832
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compilation of the Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire.
The official adoption of plans under Gorbachev for the issuance
of new criminal codes and the substantial reworking of criminal
procedure and corrections legislation is a continuation of this
Brezhnevian policy of regular improvement and updating in the
technical quality of legislation. It remains to be seen if the
new legislation on criminal law and procedure will go beyond
technical redrafting to make major changes in the rules of law
themselves.
The use of new specific criminal legislation to deal with
newly emerging social problems was a characteristic of the
Brezhnev period. Amendments to the Criminal Code under Gorbachev
to deal with spreading AIDS and with "cult of violence"
videotapes, while they involved problems that did not exist in
the 1970s, used the same approach that would have been used to
these problems in the 1970s. The harsh criminal penalties
applied to the Chernobyl management dealt with a new type of
catastrophic accident, but the result was no different than the
treatment of those held responsible for catastrophic accidents
under Brezhnev.
Three major criminal law "campaigns!' begun under Andropov
and Chernenko have been continued but gradually wound down under
Gorbachev. These were the campaigns against corruption in the
police, in the trade distribution network, and among officials.
By their nature these campaigns required some years to complete
due to the complexities of the investigations and criminal
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proceedings involved. By their nature, they could not go on
forever. As Soviet history shows, the optimum time to terminate
a purge is when incompetent, disloyal, or corrupt officials of
the old regime have been replaced by officials loyal to the new
regime.
Four areas of change in criminal law reflect distinctly new
policies of the Gorbachev regime. These involve the treatment of
dissidents, the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin's purges, the
reinstatement of acquittals, and the use of criminal law in the
anti-alcohol campaign. The politically most significant new
policy has been the early release of many persons convicted of
slandering the Soviet state and the tolerance of speech
activities that would have led to swift criminal prosecution
under Gorbachev's predecessors. Also politically significant
has been the high publicity given to the rehabilitation of
victims of Stalin's purges, most notably the rehabilitation of
Bukharin. The most significant development in criminal
procedure has been the start of the move away from the practice,
which had developed under Brezhnev, whereby the courts did not
acquit innocent defendants, but rather continually remanded their
cases for further investigation or convicted them of minor
offenses. Under Gorbachev, with the prodding of USSR Supreme
Court President Terebilov, the courts began a return to what had
been the practice under Stalin--of acquitting non-political
defendants who were in fact innocent. Gorbachev's anti-alcohol
campaign, which made vodka expensive and hard to get, immediately
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engendered a great deal of illegal bbotlegging and home
distilling. The years 1986 and 1987 saw a huge expansion in the
number of alcohol-related criminal convictions, followed by the
decriminalization of most alcohol-related offenses, perhaps
because of the overload they were placing on the criminal justice
system.
It is important to distinguish changes in legislation (or
its application) from changes in publicity or debate related to
the law. "Glasnost'" is a change in public relations and press
censorship policy, a change that affects many areas, not merely
criminal law. It allows more publication of information about
what is happening in the criminal law system and greater freedom
of debate about what should happen. As a result of "glasnost'"
foreign observers are learning more about how the Soviet criminal
law system works (or are at least having to exert less effort to
obtain data). They are also seeing Soviet officials and scholars
engaged in a lively debate, characterized by numerous suggestions
for radical change in the criminal law system.
A small group of liberal criminal law scholars, mainly
associated with the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of
Sciences, are making most of the proposals for change. Some of
the changes they suggest, like most of the changes that have
taken place, are consistent with prior policy. Others, however,
involve significant or even radical departure from prior policy.
Some proposals would be quite expensive to implement. The
changes in criminal law made so far under Gorbachev have all
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shared the characteristic that they did not involve substantial
expenditure of government funds. Indeed, they generally saved
money, if one assumes that (given the social cost of breaking up
families and of transferring skilled industrial labor to
unskilled labor camp work) it is economically disadvantageous for
the state to increase the labor camp population. (Gorbachev's
major changes resulted in reducing the labor camp population by
freeing dissidents, innocent people, and bootleggers. Some of
the new proposals, even if politically noncontroversial, may face
difficulties because of their cost.
Proposed changes that would be inexpensive to implement
include: repeal of legislation against slandering the Soviet
state, decriminalization of homosexual conduct, abolition of
exile and banishment, reduction in use of the death penalty,
making investigators independent of prosecutors, allowing earlier
defense counsel participation in the preliminary investigation,
providing jury trials, making judges and procurators independent
of local party authorities, and introducing judicial review for
Constitutionality. Proposed changes that would be more costly
include: replacing correspondence legal education with regular
legal education, building new, elegant courthouses, and
reorienting labor camps toward education rather than production.
Given the fact that some of the proposed changes face strong
popular and political opposition and that others are expensive,
it would be a great mistake to suppose that all the proposals
will be adopted. Those proposals that cost little money, face
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little popular or political opposition, and enhance the
international image of the Soviet Union are the most likely to be
adopted. The best example of such a proposal is the abolition of
exile and banishment. Even the proponents of decriminalization
of homosexual conduct admit that their proposal will face
difficulties because of the AIDS scare and general public
prejudices. Indeed, there is considerable public pressure for
tightening rather than loosening the laws on sexual conduct by
making prostitution a crime.
Reduction in use of the death penalty is hardly a radical
proposal, considering that the death penalty was abolished by
Stalin in 1947 and fully restored only under Khrushchev. (Stalin
may have thought that, given manpower losses from
collectivization and World War II, a live forced laborer was more
useful than a dead criminal.) There is some international
propaganda value in cutting back on the death penalty, so it is
probable that some reduction will be made. The extent of
reduction may limited by the strong public opinion in favor of
maintaining the death penalty.
Changes in criminal procedure probably stand a better chance
if they increase, or at least do not decrease, central control
over the political process. Abolition of the present system of
decisive local party influence in the hiring and firing of judges
and procurators would increase the ability of central authorities
to control the conduct of local party-government officials.
Improving the fairness of pretrial procedures by separating the
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investigatory process from the procuracy or allowing earlier
defense counsel participation would appear to be no threat to
central authorities. Nor would improvement of appellate
procedures to provide better scrutiny of trial court decisions
pose any threat. New courthouses, better legal education, or
more rehabilitation training in labor camps pose no threat, but
may be deferred because of the costs involved.
Only a few of the proposed changes can be seen as involving
any threat to central power. These include the proposed repeal
of legislation on slander of the state, the introduction of
juries, and the introduction of judicial review for
constitutionality. While the legislation on slander of the state
is only one of the numerous means the Soviet system has for
controlling dissident activity, the repeal of the legislation
would be a strong symbolic action indicating that freer speech
would be allowed. The Soviet leadership must be worried about
the real difficulties that freer speech has already created in
nationalities relations in general and in the Armenian situation
in particular, but must also see the real benefits in
international goodwill and Soviet intelligentsia support. There
will be a temptation to draft new legislation so asito still
punish some types of speech, but to distinguish "dangerous"
(e.g., ethnic demonstrations) and "harmless" (e.g.; "daring"
experimental theater productions) dissidence. The introduction
of juries would represent a real threat to central control if
they were available in political cases. Would an Armenian jury
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convict Armenian demonstrators? The use of juries in murder or
rape trials, on the other hand, could bring fairer trials and a
feeling of popular participation. Thus here, again, any
legislation is likely to be a selective. Judicial review for
constitutionality, though more easily controlled from above,
would represent a new and untried direction.
The detailed discussion below will begin with an analysis of
those developments in criminal law that may have had some effect
on the power structure of Soviet society, by moving power up to
the center or down to the individual. Then the analysis will
turn to the less political issues of the use of criminal law to
deal with specific problem areas of Soviet society and the
application of social science findings to develop corrections
policy. A summary of currently available statistics on crime and
punishment will follow. Final sections will deal with current
proposals for change in criminal law and their prospects of
success.
II. Movement of Power Up from the Province and Republic Levels
to Moscow
A. Introduction
A number of measures taken in the criminal law, area have the
common effect of moving up from the province and Republic levels
to Moscow. These include cleanups of law enforcement agencies,
reduction of the power of Party organizations to protect members
of the local power structure, and purges of corrupt officials.
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Two important functions of the legal system are providing the
center with information about activities in the localities and
control over these activities. Changes made in law enforcement
agencies promise more honest reporting of crime and corruption to
central authorities. The reduction in Party protectionism, the
purge of local officials, and their replacement of new officials,
all increase the chances that local authorities will carry out
centrally-mandated policies.
In a number of instances, the dismissal of Party officials
who are corrupt or who have sheltered corrupt friends has created
vacancies that Gorbachev has filled with his own men. This
circumstance raises a number of questions which belong more in
the realm of political science than of law. Is Gorbachev really
interested in stopping corruption or only interested in having an
excuse to replace officials? To the extent that his interest is
the latter, are the ousted officials really guilty or are the
charges spurious ones used to hide the real political grounds for
the officials' removal? The latter question seems to be the
easier one to answer. The charges against the officials seem to
be well-documented; no one, either inside or outside the Soviet
Union has provided any reason to doubt these charges. The former
question disregards the necessary interrelation of political
control and corruption. The fact that local officials are able
to protect vast corrupt schemes from such central agencies as the
courts, the Procuracy, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the
KGB indicates that these local authorities have a degree of
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political power that is necessarily unacceptable to a strong
central leadership. Thus the need to eliminate local
protectionism is inherently related to the desire to exert
central political control.
B. Cleaning Up Law Enforcement Agencies
1. Introduction
In the Brezhnev era, there were regular, but unpublicized
efforts to clean up corruption in law enforcement agencies.
These efforts were greatly intensified during the General
Secretaryships of Andropov and Chernenko. In 1986 and 1987,
efforts against corruption in law enforcement personnel were
given much greater publicity. By late 1987, however, there were
signs that the anti-corruption efforts had been scaled down. The
high publicity anti-corruption campaign of 1986-87 must have had
two major political payoffs for Gorbachev. First, it presented a
picture contrasting the new era of "clean government" with a
Brezhnev era of corruption. Because anti-corruption efforts were
largely secret under Brezhnev, the change appeared greater than
it was. Second, it allowed Gorbachev to replace key law
enforcement personnel with people more amenable to his control
from the center. The phasing down of the anti-corruption
campaign must have had its purposes too. Once the/new personnel
was in place, its morale had to be maintained. This would not be
possible under a system of permanent purges.
No law enforcement system is better than its personnel. One
publicized aspect of restructuring has been the dismissal of
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corrupt and incompetent personnel in the judiciary, the
procuracy, the police, and the KGB. While the press has
published fairly detailed figures on the numbers of persons
removed from the law enforcement system, comparable statistics
have not been released for earlier periods. Therefore it is
difficult to determine whether an extraordinary purge or normal
housecleaning has taking place.
2. Judges
USSR Minister of Justice Kravtsov, writing in Pravda, stated
that the authorities had dismissed fourteen judges for
incompetence, recalled 76 for abuse ofoffice, and had subjected
837 to administrative liability. Unfortunately, his account
does not give any detailed breakdown of the types of "abuse of
office" that occurred. While the percentage of judges who lost
their positions is small in terms of the total number of judges
on the bench, the number might be large enough to frighten other
judges away from practices such as accepting bribes or giving in
to protectionist pressures from local officials.' The Vice-
Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court, E. Smolentsev, reported a
steady improvement in the educational level of judges over the
years, resulting in a steady reduction in the number Of cases
reversed on appea1.2 This trend, however, relates much more to
the Brezhnev era that the Gorbachev period. The number of
persons with a legal education increased dramatically under
Brezhnev.
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There have also been reports of punishment of individual
judges for abuse of their offices. Like the more general
statement of the Minister of Justice, these individual reports
may have some deterrent effect upon improper judicial conduct,
but do little to provide a useful statistical picture.3
Legal scholars have suggested changes in the qualifications
of judges, including improving legal education, raising the
minimum age for judges, and bringing experienced lawyers into
judgeships.4 These scholars have suggested that there should be
far more judges. So far, however, the only actual increase has
been in that of the support staff of the Supreme Court.5
3. Procurators
There have been some major changes in the Procuracy.
*However, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rekunkov, who was appointed
Procurator General in 1981, remained as Procurator General
through Gorbachev's first years in power. The restructuring of
the Procuracy began under Chernenko, and was symbolized by the
restoration of Viktor Vasil'evich Naidenov to the position of
Deputy Procurator General in 1984, a position from which he was
reportedly fired under Brezhnev for overeager pursuit of a trail
of corruption that led to members of the Central Committee. The
sequence of events was as follows: on January 2, 1978, Viktor
Vasil'evich Naidenov became Deputy Procurator Genea1.6 On
February 9, 1981, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rekunkov moved up from
Deputy Procurator General to be Procurator General of the USSR.7
An Edict of November 21, 1981, discharged Naidenov from his
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position as Deputy Procurator General. This Edict implied
Naidenov's disgrace, by omitting the customary phrase "in
connection with transfer to other work."8 On July 5, 1984,
Naidenov again became Deputy Procurator Genera1.8 On February 8,
1986, Rekunkov's first five-year term as Procurator General
expired. I have been unable to find an edict reappointing him,
but as of December 1987, he remained in the office of Procurator
General.
A sensational article by Arkadii Vaksberg in Literaturnaia
pazeta revealed the story behind the chronology of Naidenov's
firing and rehiring.10 In 1981, the Procuracy was conducting an
investigation into corruption among officials in Krasnodar. The
investigation threatened Central Committee members Mediinov and
Shchelokov. They, according to Vaksberg, concocted a story that
the Procuracy was forcing false confessions out of those accused
in Krasnodar, and with this story they convinced Brezhnev himself
to fire Naidenov. With Brezhnev's death, the corrupt- Medunov and
Shchelokov lost their Party positions. Andropov, on his
deathbed, ordered Naidenov reinstated, and the authorities
carried out the order under his successor. Vaksberg describes in
graphic detail the meeting at which Naidenov lost his job. The
article makes no mention of Rekunkov, but from the chronology
above,- it is clear that Rekunkov must have presided over the
firing of Naidenov and so that Vaksberg's article is implicitly
an indictment of Reklinkov.
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Rekunkov has repeatedly come in for severe criticism from
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet for failing to effectively
supervise the Procuracy. A 1985 Decree found fault with law
enforcement and protection of citizens' rights by the Procuracy
and the local level and called for better central supervision.11
Early in 1987, the Procurator General reported on restructuring
in the Procuracy.12 He indicated that better performance was
being demanded of procurators at the local level and indicated
that several procurators had lost their jobs for incompetence or
corruption, but described no structural changes in Procuracy
operations. The Soviet press has reported a number of isolated
cases of punishment of procurators for improper activities in
criminal prosecutions, but nothing like the wholesale purge of
police officials.13 The official response to Rekunkov's claims
of "restructuring" indicated that he had still done too little.
This response was contained in a sharply critical Decree of the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued in March 1987.14
Only one, very minor structural change has occurred in the
Procuracy. Legislation has created a new "Transport Department"
in the USSR Procuracy to strengthen central influence over
transport procurators.15
4. Police
a. Introduction
At least five types of police abuse have tainted the
criminal law enforcement process: (1) taking bribes from common
criminals to overlook their crimes; (2) overlooking crimes
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committed by local officials or their clients; (3) refusing to
register complaints of hard-to-solve crimes so as to maintain a
high percentage of crimes solved; (4) "solving" crimes by
"framing" an innocent person; (5) using unacceptable police
methods such as torture to obtain confessions. Similar abuses
have, of course, plagued police systems throughout the world.
What was different about the Soviet Union was that before
"glasnost'" the press generally ignored the existence of these
abuses. A dramatic change came with the official announcement by
the Ministry of Internal Affairs that 10,000 police employees had
been dismissed in the period 1982_1987).6 The announcement did
not indicate in any detail the causes of the dismissals, but
other stories recount dismissals.based on all the above types of
police abuse. In addition to these reports of mass dismissals,
the Soviet press has carried a number of reports of dismissals of
individual police officials.17 The existence of the various
types of police abuses that the Soviet press had described in the
Soviet press are hardly surprising. Such abuses exist in many
countries throughout the world. One change that has taken place
in the Soviet Union is that there is now an official recognition
that these abuses exist and an announced policy of dealing with
them severely. Hard questions remain for the foreign observer.
How effective has the implementation of this new policy been in
practice? Do Soviet citizens have more respect for the police as
a result of the announced new policy?
b. Taking Bribes to Overlook Criminal Activity
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Taking bribes from common criminals to overlook their crimes
has long been a commonplace practice in the Soviet Union.18
Periodically there have been crackdowns on these practices)-9
However, the Andropov-Chernenko period appears to have been one
of an unusually severe campaign against policemen who took
bribes. Although the height of this campaign has passed, stories
of punishment of corrupt police officials still appear in this
press, stories that may have some deterrent effect. For
instance, in December 1987, Krasnaia zvezda reported that a court
sentenced the former chief of the Volgograd Province Police,
General Ivanov, to ten years in prison for taking bribes as part
of a scheme to cover up thefts from industrial enterprises, and
that the court also imposed severe sentences on the other police
and economic officials involved.
c. Covering Up Crime Due to Influence from Local
Authorities
Often press reports of disciplinary action taken against
police do not distinguish between covering up crimes for bribes
and covering up crimes due to influence from local authorities.
Thus for instance, a report in Kazakhstanskaia pravda stated that
900 police employees were fired for various abuses, including the
covering up of crimes, during the first half of 1987.20 In a
case reported in Pravda, a thief, who was blackmailed for
"protection " by the police, turned the blackmailers in. The
police officials received long sentences. The article did not
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exactly encourage turning in such blackmailers, since it reported
that the thief who "blew the whistle" got three years himself.21
d. Refusing to Register Complaints of Hard-to-
Solve Crimes,
Perhaps the most common complaint against the police ,
mentioned under Gorbachev has been their refusal to register
complaints of hard-to-solve crimes, so as to maintain a record
for solving a high percentage of reported crimes. This problem
is part of the larger problem of perverse plan indicators that
has had severe negative effects on the work of the courts and the
procuracy as well. A decree of the Presidium of the Supreme .
Soviet specifically condemned this practice.22 A 'number of
press reports have Mentioned the discharge of police personnel
for engaging in these practices.23 This complaint is not a new
one; it remains to be seen if current efforts will be more
sucCessful than previous attempts to deal with the underreporting
of crime.
e. "Solving" Crimes by "Framing" an Innocent
Person
An even worse phenomenon related to plan pressure on the
police is that of maintaining high percentages of crimes "solved"
and of giving in to public pressures to solve individual crimes,
by using false testimony or forced confessions to!"frame"
innocent persons and thus be able to list crimes as "'solved."
The Soviet press has reported severe sanctions on police who use
such. tactics. Thus, for instance, an Izvestia article reported
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replacement of thirty staff members of the Belorussian Ministry
of Internal Affairs as the result of an investigation into a
false conviction engineered by Ministry officials.24
f. Torture
An article in Ogonek appears to signal a practice of
aggressive punishment of police who use torture to obtain
confessions. Authorities dismissed police in Karelia who had
beaten crime suspects and ousted local authorities who had
encouraged or protected the police.25
5. Psychiatrists
The Western press long has depicted psychiatric abuse in the
Soviet Union as involving the confinement of sane or harmless
dissidents as dangerous psychotics. Such abuses, however, have -
not involved the criminal law. (They may involve the criminal
law in the future, since unlawful psychiatric confinement may be
made a criminal offense.) A separate report, which I am now
preparing, on Soviet administrative law, will deal with the
psychiatric confinement of dissidents and other troublemakers.
One type of psychiatric abuse is, however, closely related to
corruption in law enforcement. It involves psychiatrists
accepting bribes to declare criminals insane and thus help them
avoid criminal responsibility.
Foreign observers of the Soviet legal system had given some
attention to the feigning of psychiatric illness by sane
criminals even before the period of "glasnost' .?28 However, it
was not until 1987 that disclosures in the Soviet press made the
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magnitude of the problem apparent. A campaign has been underway
against psychiatrists who have accepted bribes for diagnosing
criminals as "insane" to save them from criminal punishment.
According to the press articles, Viktor Ivanovich Maliukin has
headed a group in the Moscow City Procuracy, investigating
bribetakers among psychiatrists. It appears that for 5,000 to
8,000 rubles, a criminal has been able to bribe his way out of
jail.27 Members of Maliukin's team reported that a case had been
begun in September against a number of prominent psychiatrists:
the Head of the Department of Higher and Secondary Education of
the Main Administration of Educational Institutions of the USSR
Ministry of Health, a Senior Research Associate of the All-Union
Center for Mental Health, a Senior Research Associate of the All-
Union Serbskii Scientific Research Institute of General and
Forensic Psychiatry, and the head of a division of the Central
Moscow Oblast Psychiatric Hospital. They said that in an earlier
case a court had sentenced the Head of the Expert Commission of
the Kashenko Hospital to nine years of deprivation of freedom,
and that there had already been 15 to 20 cases, which were just
the tip of the iceberg. They indicated that serious
investigations had not yet begun outside of Moscow. This report,
in Komsomol'skaia pravda, a newspaper with a huge circulation
throughout the Soviet Union, undoubtedly came to the attention of
every psychiatrist in the country who was taking or was
contemplating taking bribes. Most of them had probably seen or
heard of the earlier more fragmentary reports as well. This
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publicity is likely to have a significant deterrent effect,
particularly if it reinforced with similar articles on action
being taken against corrupt psychiatrists outside of Moscow.
The press articles pointed that two reasons why bribery had
flourished were the lack of agreed standards of psychiatric
diagnosis and the lack of effective judicial review of
psychiatric findings. In August 1987, Soviet Deputy Foreign
Minister Anatolii Adamishin told a Moscow press conference there
were plans to introduce criminal liability for abuse of
psychiatry.28
6. The Phaseout of the Anticorruption Campaign
An article published in Izvestia in December 1987 and an
article published in Pravda in January 1988 may have signaled the
end of the all-out campaign on corruption in law enforcement
agencies. Like Stalin's famous "Dizzy With Success" speech in
the 1930s, these articles revealed that the campaign had involved
some excesses. In the Izvestia article, the First Deputy
Minister of Internal Affairs stated that in 1983-1985 there was
something like a purge of internal affairs agency, and said the
campaign had gone to far.29 The Pravda
article reported on the disciplining of local procuracy,
judiciary, and KGB officials who, apparently under pressure to
report a cleanup of the police in their area, had persecuted an
innocent police officia1.30
C. Preventing Party Protectionism
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The most serious obstacle to the elimination of corruption
is protectionism by local Party officials. In some cases these
officials are part of the corrupt scheme themselves; in other
cases, they are taking bribes from the officials engaged in
corrupt activity; in still other cases, they impede
investigations to avoid creating the impression that they are bad
managers who have allowed corruption to furnish. The authorities
are taking two major approaches to this problem. One is
regularly publishing stories of the imposition of severe
punishment upon persons who have used their Party positions to
protect themselves and their friends from criminal
responsibility. The other is the publications of speeches and
official resolutions against the practice. However, these
approaches are the same ones that have had only limited success
in the past. If the Politburo decides to continue the campaign
against corruption among lower level officials, it may well
decide to.go further and accept suggestions (discussed below) of
the legal elite for structural changes in the to reduce local
Party influence in the criminal justice system.
? Two long-standing Party practices make possible the exercise
of protectionism by Party authorities. The first is the custom
that the Procuracy will not initiate criminal prosecution against
a Party official until the official's Party organization has
tried him-and expelled him from the Party. The second is that
under the unomenklatura" system, local Party authorities control
the hiring, firing, and promotion of judges and procurators.
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These practices do not give the local authorities full power to
exercise protectionism; higher Party authorities can always
overrule any decision of local Party officials.
Numerous newspaper articles in 1986 and 1987 carried the
message that dire consequences were in store for those who used
their Party position to protect those guilty of criminal
offenses. A June 1986 Izvestia article was strongly critical of
the fact that local authorities kept from the jurisdiction of the
courts a Party member apparently guilty of criminal activity on
the grounds that Party investigation of his case was
proceeding.31 An October 1986 Pravda article in emphasized the
danger Party
reported the
of an oblast
officials
discharge
ran if they practiced protectionism.32 It
from the Party and expulsion from office
First Secretary and other Party and government
officials who had practiced protectionism. A December 1986
Izvestia article33 told the fate of a district Party first
secretary, who attempted to pressure the district procurator to
drop criminal proceedings against a collective farm chairman, who
had been buying stolen milk to inflate his farm's production
reports. The first secretary also attempted to protect the farm
chairman by having the local governmental authorities refuse to
waive the immunity the farm chairman enjoyed as a deputy to the
local Soviet. The end result, however, was that higher Party
agencies, fired the first secretary from his post and expelled
him from Party membership, while the press lavishly praised the
procurator. This story described events that occurred in 1982-
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1984. the removal of the powers of protectionism of the
particular local Party official reflected Andropov's policy and
its continuation under Chernenko.34 However, Gorbachev's
"glasnost'" is responsible for the widespread publicity given to
the case.
Another case, which apparently received only local publicity,
involved punishment for protectionism itself. An official of the
Kazakhstan Party Central Committee, Andrei Statenin lost his
Party position in February 1987, during the shakeup of the
Kazahstan Party organization, for "protectionism" and other
offenses (which included theft of furniture and corruption in
distribution of apartments). The cdurt sentenced him to eight
years in a labor camp for his crimes.35
Anti-protectionism also became a favorite theme of speeches
by high officials. The Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court hinted
at the problem of protectionism in a 1986 speech, stating,
"Sometimes nonobjectivity is the result of the influence of
officials,"36 The Procurator General was much more specific in
attacking protectionism.
Or how should one evaluate, for example, the work of
the leadership of the Procuracy of the Turkmenian SSSR
(procurator A. Kharchenko), who, so to speak, sat with their
hands folded and did not look at the materials they had
taking account of the state of affairs revealed in
Uzbekistan. And in Tashauz Province and a number of other
places, false reports of plan fulfillment, theft, and
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bribery connected with the sale and processing of cotton
were flourishing. Moreover, when such cases nevertheless
arose, they "pressed on the brakes," the guilty parties were
let off with a gentle fright; they were convicted for
carelessness or were completely freed from responsibility.
It required the interference of the Procuracy of the USSR
and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
Turkmenistan. The causes of this, as an audit conducted not
long ago showed, were political nearsightedness,
professional helplessness and lack of desire to resist the
local authorities.37
Despite the accomplishments to which Procurator General
Rekunkov pointed, first the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and
then the Central Committee of the Party severely criticized the
Procuracy.
In a decree of March 27, 1987,38 following up on a 1985 decree"
critical of the Procuracy, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
stated:
Procurators lack the necessary integrity in the
struggle with phenomena of localism, departmentalism,
bureaucratism, and abuses by officials causing harm to the
interests of society and the rights of citizens. .
. . . [The Procuracy must] strengthen its demands toward
procuratorial and investigative cadres for the
irreproachable fulfillment of their service duty. (The
all
V
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Procuracy must] react instantly and sharply to the violation
of legality by officials regardless of their posts and
ranks. It must ensure the timely and full exposure of
crimes, the inevitability of punishment for guilty parties.
A published summary of a Central Committee Resolution of June 4,
1987, entitled, "On Measures for Increasing the Role of
Procuratorial Supervision and Strengthening Socialist Legality
and the Legal Order," contained the following:
. . . Some of the Procuracy officials did not adhere to
principled positions of legality, and came under the effect
of local influence and narrow departmental interests. They
did not always put a timely end to large-scale thefts of
socialist property, bribery, report-padding, and deceptive
practice into which large groups of people were drawn,
including high-ranking officials.
Certain local Party committees, instead of supervising
and helping the Communists working in the Procuracy, took
insufficient steps to eliminate omissions in their activity,
and engaged in administrative fiat and unjustified
interference in Procuratorial functions.
. . . Party agencies are obligated to ensure the
undeviating bringing to life of Leninist principles of the
independence of the Procuracy, to stop any attempts to put
pressure on Procurators as they adopt decisions on matters
within their competence or to interfere in the investigation
of criminal cases . . .40
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The Central Committee came out strongly against
protectionism in 1986:
. . . every instance violation of legality, no matter
by whom, must receive a principled, sharp appraisal and must
be subjected to a harsh condemnation, with the guilty
parties must be most strictly punished. In this respect, it
is necessary to firmly implement the requirement of the
Statutes of the CPSU on the dual responsibility of
Communists--to the state and to the Party--for violation of
the law. With respect to those who try to flout Soviet
and citizens' rights, there cannot and must not be any
liberalism or leniency.
?
laws
The attention of Party committees has been called to
the need to strengthen the political leadership of law-
enforcement agencies, to oversee their activity and increase
their responsibility for the accurate performance of the
functions entrusted to them. In this respect, the Central
Committee of the CPSU indicated that no interference will be
allowed from any side in the investigation and court
examination of specific cases.41
The Politburo also emphasized the importance of fighting
protectionism:
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Having discussed the question of the further
strengthening socialist legality, the Politburo emphasized
that in the process of restructuring and of deepening
expanding socialist democracy, the undeviating observance of
laws takes on even greater significance for the development
of our state system, self-government by the people, the
ensuring of social justice and the unshakability of the
constitutional rights and freedoms of the working people.
In this connection, it is necessary to consistently
reorganize the work of the Procuracy, the police, the
courts, and other law-enforcement agencies. They must serve
as an example of the strictest observance of the legal
order, reliably protect citizens' interests and, at' the same
time, resolutely put a stop to antisocial phenomena and wage
an unrelenting struggle against crime and other law
violations. It was pointed out that any attempt from any
side whatsoever to interfere in the investigation and trial
of specific cases is impermissible. Party committees were
advised to regard their efforts to strengthen legality as
one of their most important political tasks. The areas were
defined in which it is necessary to further increase the
responsibility of ministries and departments and also trade
union and other public organizations in their: struggle for
the interests of society and the state and for the unfailing
observance of citizens' labor, housing, and other rights.42
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There is no doubt that the combination of rhetoric from the
Politburo, the Central Committee, the Chairman of the Supreme
Court, and the Procurator General and object lessons from cases
described in the press may have some effect on the willingness of
Party officials to engage in protectionism and on that of
procurators and judges to succumb to pressures from Party
officials. However, a number of leading Soviet legal scholars
think that such rhetoric and publicity is not enough--that
structural changes are needed in the system for the selection of
judges.
This system as it works in practice make judges heavily
beholden to local Party authorities.43 The citizens of a
district (raion) or city (gorod) directly "elect" the judges of
the district "People's Court" (the lowest courts of general
jurisdiction, not to be confused with a "Comrades Court"--an
informal tribunal with extremely limited powers). In practice
the district or city Party committee plays a major or decisive
role in their selection. At the next level, that of the province
(oblast) or large city (such as Moscow or Leningrad), the
province or city Soviet selects the judges. This means that the
province or city Party committee controls the selection. Judges
serve for a term of five years, but may be recalled earlier on
Party recommendation. Without making specific suggestions, the
Director of the Institute of State and Law has stated that one of
the major tasks of restructuring of the legal system should be
creating an atmosphere of "independence from local influence."44'
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A leading Soviet criminal law scholar has argued that the
republic supreme soviets or their presidia, rather than voters or
local governments, should choose district, city and province
*judges, that judges enjoy a ten year term of office, that
district People's Court Judges be on the start roles of the
province or large city Soviet. Most importantly, he has
suggested that they be subject to the jurisdiction of the Party
committee at that higher level ("i tam zhe sostoiat na partiinom
uchete").45 Other legal scholars made similar suggestions at a
1986 meeting with members of the USSR Supreme Court." Another
writer has suggested that increasing the number of people's
assessors would make it harder for local Party officials to
influence the courts.47
D. Purging Corrupt Local Officials
1. Introduction
Because the Party under Brezhnev allowed neither open
discussion of the extent official corruption nor publication of
criminal statistics, there is no way to gauge the extent of
either such corruption or of anticorruption efforts at the time
of Brezhnev's death. However, the guaranteed life tenure for
local Party officials and the power that went with it must have
greatly facilitated corruption. It is clear that Andropov
launched a well-publicized campaign against corruption and that
this campaign has been continued under Chernenko and Gorbachev.
Brezhnev's successors must have perceived a declared war on
corruption as having a number of potential advantages. These
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would include (1) improving economic performance by preventing
diversion of funds into unproductive uses, (2) improving the
morale of hard-working citizens by the ostentatious punishment of
a parasitic class, (3) facilitating the replacement of elderly,
corrupt, inefficient officials, with more capable younger
personnel, who would be loyal to the new leader, (4) curbing
nationalistic forces by concentrating attacks on corruption in
non-Russian areas, (5) improving the Soviet image abroad, (6)
raising public morale, (7) for Andropov and Gorbachev, satisfying
their own personal values as legal professionals. Gorbachev
inherited an full-fledged anti-corruption operation at the time
when various investigations had reached the point that well-
documented charges could be brought. While there is no evidence
that he increased the level of criminal law Pressure against
corruption, he definitely increased the amount of publicity and
succeeded in replacing a large number of officials labeled as
corrupt leftovers from the Brezhnev era.
Publicity about the anticorruption efforts has taken several
forms. The main one has been the publication by the Soviet press
of numerous accounts of individual cases of punishment of corrupt
officials. These reports hardly could have escaped anyone's
attention, but the points they implied were made explicit by
Procurator General Rekunkov in an interview published in Pravda
in which he summarized the progress of the anticorruption
campaign.48 The Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the USSR (read
by many in the legal profession and almost no one outside the
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legal profession) has published more formal and technical legal
reports of corruption cases.
The corruption reports have suggested that the most serious
problems were in Uzbekistan and Kazahstan. The newspapers
reported that, in these republics, very high Party and government
officials were involved in the theft of incredible amounts of
government funds. Reported cases from Slavic regions, in
contrast, have generally been limited to corruption in particular
economic organizations rather than in the government-Party
structure.
2. Central Asia
a. Kazakhstan
Gorbachev's "takeover" of the Kazahstan Communist Party in
late 1986 and early 1987 was accompanied by extensive use of
criminal law and other measures to clean out corruption there.
The "good life" enjoyed there by corrupt officials before the
takeover is described (with pictures) in an article in Ooonek.49
According to another news report, a court sentenced Andrei
Statenin, administrator of affairs of the Kazakh Party Central
Committee until his ouster in February 1987 for various types of
corruption, to eight years in a labor camp for "embezzlement of
state property.?50
b. Uzbekistan
A major cleanup occurred in Uzbekistan, where corruption
centered in the cotton-processing industry eventually involved
huge numbers of economic, governmental, Party, and law
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enforcement officials. A news report appeared in 1985, which
mentioned Party action, but no criminal charges.51 In 1986, a
detailed report of criminal proceedings appeared in the Bulletin
of the Supreme Court of the USSR, with summaries in Pravda and
Izvestia.52
A special Supreme Court panel sentenced the Uzbek Republic
Minister of the Cotton-Processing Industry to death for
corruption. The panel gave his thirteen codefendants long labor
camp terms. According to the Supreme Court, Usmanov personally
received 500,000 rubles out of a total of 800,000 in bribes.
Izvestia gave nation-wide publicity to another case of
corruption in Uzbekistan in June, 1987.53 The newspaper stated
that the a court had convicted A.K. Karimov, the former First
Secretary of the Bukhara Province Party Committee, of taking and
giving
bribes over
death. It further
others
involved in
were investigating
the period 1977-1983 and had sentenced him to
stated that the courts had already convicted
the bribery schemes and that the authorities
additional suspects. An official report in
the Bulletin of the Supreme
details. The 1983 date for
suggests that this
that reached their
Court of the USSR54 provided further
the end of the criminal activity
case, like a number of other corruption cases
conclusion under Gorbachev, had its beginning
under Andropov or Chernenko.
? 3. The Caucasus
A widespread campaign against corruption in Georgia was
reported in the Soviet press in 1985 and 1986.55
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4. The Slavic Provinces
a. Rostov
A cleanup of the trade organization in Rostov-on-Don was
begun before Gorbachev came to office. The cleanup continued
under his leadership, with the sentencing in 1986 of one Rostov
trade official to death and another to the maximum term of
fifteen years.56 The most recent victim of the Rostov scandal
was Brezhnev's private secretary, who was jailed for using his
influence to block an investigation in the case.57
b. Krasnodar Trade Cleanup
A corrupt group of trade officials in Krasnodar, with
connections in the Central Committee, were able to avoid
prosecution under Brezhnev, but were finally cleaned out in the
years after his death. This is the case discussed above in
connection with the issue of corruption in the Procuracy.58 Like
the Rostov scandal, it involved a direct negative reflection on
the Erezhnev regime.
5. Moscow
a. The Trade Distribution System
The major campaign against corruption began under Andropov
with the arrest of the director of the leading grocery
store/delicatessen in Moscow, "Gastronom No. 1" (also known as
the Eliseevskii Gastronom, after the name of its pre-
revolutionary owner). In 1984 a court convicted him of
involvement in numerous schemes of bribery and theft and
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sentenced him to death. Soon thereafter a newspaper published a
report of his execution.59 The anti-corruption campaign begun
with this case continued under Chernenko, and was further
continued, with renewed publicity under Gorbachev."
b. The Foreign Trade Establishment
The Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the USSR has given
reports of severe punishments against Soviet foreign trade
officials. In 1986, a special panel of the Criminal Division of
the USSR Supreme court convicted a number of Soviet foreign trade
officials of receiving bribes from foreign businesses and
stealing Soviet government funds.61 The court imposed severe
sentences and also issued a formal demand that the Ministry of
Foreign Trade institute anti-corruption measures. As a result
the Ministry issued new internal regulations and a number of its
officials were subjected to official and Party discipline and in
some cases discharged. Those convicted, V.A. Praslov, D.K.
Mikhailov, Iu. A. Lykov, and A.A. Nikitin., had held high
positions in the Soviet foreign trade combine,
Soiuyzveshstrojimport." This is a Soviet construction firm that
deals with foreign customers and subcontractors. (Incidentally,
it was the firm that built the new American Embassy in Moscow.)
Another special panel of the Criminal Division of the USSR
Supreme Court sentenced Vladimir Sushkov, the former Deputy
Minister of Foreign Trade to thirteen years in a labor camp for
taking bribes amounting to 126,857 rubles from representatives of
foreign business firms. The panel sentenced his wife, Valentina
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Sushkova, former Deputy Head of the European Department of The
Administration for Scientific and Technical Cooperation with
Capitalist and Developing Countries of the State Committee on
Science and Technology, to eleven years for her receipt of
368,933 rubles in bribes, and his assistant, E.G. Kuz'minykh to
six years, all with confiscation of property.63
In both cases, the court report indicated that the crimes
continued until 1985, indicating that the prosecution started at
about the time Gorbachev became head of the Party.
6. Miscellaneous
In addition to these reports indicating the cleanup of
centers of corruption, the newspapers have been carrying large
numbers of reports of convictions in separate incidents of
corruption. While these do not bear a particular pattern, the
quantity of newspaper reports is clearly meant to increase the
fear of prosecution on the part of officials tempted by
opportunities for corruption, and convince the populace that
something is being done about the parasitical official class.
Since a number of the cases involve quite high officials, they
also signal that high office is not a guarantee of protection
against prosecution. Reported cases include: selling draft
deferments;64 theft in the RSFSR Ministry
of Light Industry;66
bribery and blackmarketeering in the USSR Ministry of Tractor and
Agricultural Machinebuilding and Ministry of Construction, Road,
and Public Service Machine Building; 66 bribery in car sales in
Moldavia;67 bribery, blackmarketeering, and smuggling in the
?
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Ministry of Energy and Electrification of the USSR;88 acceptance
of bribes by the former Chairman of the USSR State Committee for
the Supply of Oil Products, T.Z. Khuramshin." the reported
arrest of Brezhnevis son-in-law;70 the sentencing of a housing
official who took bribes for assigning apartments to thirteen
years in a labor camp;71 the sentencing of a bookkeeper who
stole 327,000 rubles to death;72 a corrupt auditor;73 bribery for
admission to educational institutions;74 bribery of a doctor by
students and patients;75 a fifteen year sentence for a deputy
minister;78 accepting bribes by a labor camp administrator;77 a
bribe'to get a design done.78
III. Movement of Power Down from the Oblast' and Republic Levels
to Low Level Officials and the Public
Province and republic level officials are losing power not
only to Moscow, but also to those under their jurisdiction. In
particular, they are losing power to control law enforcement
officials in their localities and losing power to persecute local
"whistleblowers" who inform on their crimes to the central
authorities.
A. Reducing Local Party Control of Local Law Enforcement
Officials
The way in which local, party control over low level local
officials is being reduced is illustrated by an significant
incident that took place in late 1986 and early 1987 involving a
local KGB official. The KGB, acting on the behest of local
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authorities in Voroshilovgrad, participated in the arrest and
physical mistreatment of an investigative reporter who was
exposing the local authorities' misdeeds. Eventually, the KGB
severely disciplined the official responsible and his superiors.
The head of the Ukrainian Republic KGB lost both his job and his
position on the Ukrainian Politburo.79 An understanding of the
role of the KGB in this incident is essential to an understanding
of what has happened to the criminal law enforcement system under
Gorbachev. A leading authority on the KGB offers the following
interpretation:
(Chebrikov, the head of the KGB,] did not, however,
make another public statement until January, 1987, when he
suffered the humiliation of acknowledging on the front page
of Pravda that the KGB had been responsible for the unlawful
arrest and detention of an investigative reporter in
Voroshilovgrad. . . . In view of the proposals for reforms
in the legal codes and for a restructuring of the legal
organs, it appeared that the Gorbachev leadership was no
longer going to allow the KGB the freedom to flout Socialist
legality in the name of political security. 80
In my opinion, this incident and its aftermath should be
interpreted quite differently, as strengthening rather than
weakening the KGB. I believe that important messages were sent
to three major groups: KGB staff members, local Party officials,
and the public at large.. KGB staff members were informed that
they could be dismissed if disobeyed orders from the center and
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were caught kowtowing to local Party officials who were trying to
cover up their own wrongdoing. Local Party officials were
informed that they could not expect the local KGB to ovdrlook
corruption or suppression of evidence thereof. The public at
large was informed that it could expect cooperation and
protection rather than persecution if it reported on the
corruption or inefficiency of local officialdom. The importance
of these messages was emphasized by the fact that Chebrikov's
statement was printed on the front page of Pravda.
B. Protecting Whistleblowers
A "whistleblower" may be defined as someone who reports on
his superiors to authorities in a higher level organization or in
an organization outside his chain of command. A major type of
abuse of Soviet criminal law has been its use to silence
"whistleblowers" and thereby protect corrupt local authorities
from sanctions by central or parallel authorities. An excellent
study of "Whistleblowing" in Brezhnev's last years concluded the
authorities failed to provide good protection for
whistleblowers.81 A more recent study indicates that somewhat
better protection has been provided by more recent curbs on use
of criminal prosecutions by Soviet politicians to silence
"whistleblowers."82
Protection of whistleblowers serves two distinct functions.
First, it allows the whistleblower to continue to transmit
information to higher authorities, something the whistleblower
may be rendered unable to do if unjustly convicted and sent to a
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labor camp or if improperly sent to a psychiatric hospital.
Second, it removes the fear that would prevent many citizens from
becoming whistleblowers in the first place.
Criminal Law has a dual function in protecting
whistleblowers. The first is that the system must be structured
so that influential authorities cannot secure the unjustified
conviction of whistleblowers. The second is that those who
would persecute whistleblowers must themselves be subject to the
threat of criminal liability. In this connection a new article
was put in the Russian Republic Criminal Code in 1985:
Article 139-1. Persecution of a Citizen for Criticism
Intentional infringement by an official of the rights and
legally protected interests of a citizen connected with
persecution of him for submitting, by the established
procedure, of proposals, declarations, appeals or for
criticism contained in them, or for making critical
statements in some other form-- shall be punished by a fine
of up to three hundred rubles or by discharge from the
position held.
the same actions, if they have caused essential harm to the
rights and legally protected interests of the citizen--
a
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shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up
to two years or by corrective task for a term of one two
years or by discharge from the position held.
The appearance of this article of the code was reinforced by the
publication of a Supreme Court decree giving details of how it
should be applied.83 An article in Literaturnaia gazeta gave
wide publicity to the new legislation.84
The real sanctions in practice against those who persecute
"whistleblowers" appear not to be those stated in this new
article of the Criminal Code, but rather the imposition Party and
job discipline. The threat of these sanctions is conveyed by
press reports of particular cases in which local officials who
tried to silence whistleblowers suffered serious consequences. A
more specific message is given to the legal profession by
published court cases involving whistleblowing.
The most significant press report was already mentioned
above, the extensive purge of Ukrainian officials in the
aftermath of the persecution of a whistleblowing reporter in
Voroshilovgrad was a strong signal from the central authorities
that interference with channels of communication from below will
not be tolerated. In Moldavia, the murder of a whistleblower
lead to the discharge of a number of econorrlic and law enforcement
officials.85 A Moldavian veterinarian from the republic's
Kriulyany raion was shot dead by two gunmen on April 6 after
revealing incidents of corruption on a collective farm in the
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raion. In the preceding.months, managers of the collective farm
had taken action against Virdesh, who in turn appealed without
result to higher Party and legal organs. The newspaper said the
Moldavian Party's Central Committee bureau had assessed the
murder as "a political act of revenge for criticism revealing
figure-padding and other illegal activities." It said three
officials including the head of the collective farm had been
fired and expelled from the Party. The district deputy
procurator and a Moldavian Central committee member to whom
Virdesh appealed also were discharged. Severe Party reprimands
were placed in the files of nine more officials. T. Lavranchuk,
Ministry of the Interior (Police) of the Moldavian Republic and
the chief of his political department were censured.
The case of Midhat Shakirov, First Secretary of the Bashir
Autonomous Republic Party Committee was an object lesson to make
it clear to both Party officials and prospective whistleblowers
that Moscow would not tolerate an abuse of this type and would
punish those responsible. Leonid Safronov, Second Secretary of
the Ufa City Party Committee objected to Shakirov's choice of a
new First Secretary for the City Party Committee. On Shakirov's
orders local officials of the People's Control Committee, the
Party Control Committee and the Procurator's Office conspired to
convict Safronov under falsified charges. When a higher court
reversed this conviction, other falsified charges were brought.
The First Secretary ordered the arrest of a Party official who
had refused to give false testimony against Safronov. Another
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whistleblower in Bashkiria, the physician R. Bogdanov, had
refused to sign false economic documents. In retaliation
falsified charges were brought against him. The local court
convicted him on these charges and sentenced him to four years'
deprivation of freedom." Eventually, the intervention of
Procuracy officials and higher courts led to the reversal of all
the convictions. A court decision restored Bogdanov to his old
job and awarded him back pay. Radio Moscow reported in early
June that after discussing the Pravda article exposing Shakirov,
the Bashkiria Party Committee asked the Central Committee to
remove Shakirov from his position as First Secretary.87 Two
weeks later, Radio Moscow reported that the Party authorities had
removed Shakirov for "incorrect methods of leadership, the
persecution of disagreeable workers, and gross violations of the
law.88
A case reported in the Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the
USSR was clearly meant as a message to the lower courts that they
should not allow themselves to be used as a means for the
persecution of whistleblowers. In this case, R.V. Kengerali had
attempted to report illegal activities by his superiors. They
trumped up a charge that he had accepted a bribe himself. The
lower courts convicted him, the republic Supreme Court freed
him." The decree was emphatic in its condemnation of the
attempt to use criminal law against a whistleblower.
1. Protecting Whistleblowers from Unjustified
Psychiatric Commitment
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? An account of an attempt to use psychiatry by corrupt local
officials against someone who was blowing a whistle on their
illegal activities appeared in a Pravda article in May 1987. As
was mentioned just above, this article told how local authorities
persecuted a physician and medical administrator, R. Bogdanov,
who refused to sign economic documents containing false data.
When the local authorities had him arrested, they also subjected
him to a psychiatric examination as part of their intimidation
effort." In the following months the Soviet press reported a
number of additional cases involving the use of psychiatry to
silence "whistleblowers." An article in Izvestia in July 1987
reported how psychiatrists had agreed to the confinementin
mental institutions of several people who had reported abuses to
authorities.91 An article in November 1987 in Komsomol'skaia
pravda reported how factory management had a worker committed for
complaining about how they ran the factory.92
The public admission that local authorities are using
psychiatry to deal with whistleblowers suggests that further
changes are likely to be made. In a statement in August 1987,
Soviet Deputy Foreign Ministers Anatolii Adamishin said there
were plans to introduce criminal liability for abuse of
psychiatry and also stricter administrative controls and more
patient rights."
Two rather contradictory elements appeared in the
whistleblower picture in 1988. The first was the adoption of a
decree stating that the authorities were not to act on anonymous
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accusations. The second was beginning of the end of the
adulation of Pavlik Morozov, the peasant boy who had attained
glory under Stalin by denouncing his father as a criminal.94
Both these developments suggest that there is a fine line still
to be drawn between the whistleblower to be protected and the
hated informer and anonymous accuser of the Stalin period.
IV. Exposing and Treating the Sore Spots in Soviet Society
A. Introduction
Publicized campaigns against particular types of crime have
been characteristic all periods of Soviet legal history. There
have been an unusually large number of such campaigns during the
Gorbachev period.. These campaigns have differed in variaus ways
from campaigns under previous General Secretaries. In the case
of alcohol, the government caused the crime problem by its sharp
restrictions on liquor sales in a situation reminiscent of way
Prohibition led to crime in the United States in the 1920s. In
the case of drugs, glasnost' allowed publicization of a problem
that was previously officially a "non-problem." Some of the
problems at which criminal legislation is aimed are products of
the times rather than of specific new policies--offenses relating
to videotape distribution and to AIDS, for instance.
B. Illegal Alcohol Production and Distribution
&major item in Gorbachev's domestic "perestroika" and
"uskorenie" (speedup) policies is the anti-alcohol campaign.
This campaign has involved a dramatic reduction in the official
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production of alcoholic beverages, severe restrictions on the
availability of these beverages in restaurants and stores, and a
sharp increase in their price. The result has been an increase
in a number of types of criminal offenses. These include making
and possessing equipment for home-distilling, theft of raw
materials for use in home-distilling, engaging in home-
distilling, selling home-brew, and illegal private trade in
alcoholic beverages. The USSR Supreme Court has called for the
courts to be vigilant against all of these offenses.95
The increase in the price and reduction in the availability
of vodka led to a massive increase in arrests and criminal trials
for home-distilling. By the spring of 1987, the volume of these
cases was such that they must have begun to overload the criminal
justice system. The USSR Minister of Internal Affairs reported
that in 1986 the courts had imposed criminal sentences on 130,000
persons for home distilling and that enforcement agencies had
inflicted administrative punishment on 70,000 more.96 He said
that of the criminal sentences, two thirds were fines and 23%
corrective labor tasks. (A person sentenced to corrective labor
tasks may continue at his job, but loses various benefits and has
a substantial portion of his wages taken.) Courts sentenced over
1000 repeat offenders to labor camps. According to other
newspaper reports, home-distilling charges were brought against
100,000 persons in the first half of 1987.97
This massive enforcement campaign had some deterrent effect.
6
It was accompanied in most localities by an amnesty for those who
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voluntarily surrendered their stills to the police. According to
the Minister of Internal Affairs, in Chernigov Province alone
citizens turned in 32,800 stills were turned in the course of
eighteen months. For the USSR as a whole, he said policy had
confiscated or accepted 900,000 in the same period." (The high
rate of voluntary surrender of stills is explained by a police
practice of alternating periods of severe crackdowns on home
distilling with periods of amnesty for those who turned in their
stills voluntarily.)
The huge number of home distilling cases must have created
manpower problems for the criminal justice system. Soviet law
requires the facts of each case to be proved in court, even if
the defendant admits his guilt. Thus hundreds of thousands of
convictions for illegal distilling meant hundreds of thousands of
trials. As a leading Soviet criminal law expert recently pointed
out, the Soviet judiciary is seriously understaffed. He noted
that despite the fact that the population of the USSR was 4.7
times greater than that of West Germany, the number of judges was
the same in both countries, about 15,000.99
It may well have been pressure on the capacity of the
judicial system that led the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet
to adopt, on May 29, 1987, a decree providing that. first time
home-distilling offenders would be subjected to administrative,
rather than criminal liability, thus removing these cases from
the criminal courts and substituting a simplified administrative
procedure for a full court tria1.1" This simplified procedure
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had long been in effect for the possession of home-brew for
personal use. It had been introduced in 1986 for home
preparation of wine.101 It was now extended to first time to the
manufacture of home-brew and the possession of home-distilling
equipment. Under the new legislation, the police could fine
offenders on the spot and destroy stills and home-brew without
having to go to court. While the law provides for a procedure
for appeal of such fines to a judge, such appeals would be likely
to be extremely rare in practice, because of their slight chance
of success.
Under the new legislation, although criminal penalties are
dropped for first offenders, criminal .sanctions will be kept and
indeed made more harsh for repeat offenders. However, the total
number of persons subject to criminal charges should fall
dramatically, both because first offenders will be more careful
and because undoubtedly family members will take turns being
"first offenders" when family distilling operations are caught.
In addition to home-distilling, there are a number of other
types of alcohol-related offenses. Persons buying alcoholic
beverages to resell for a profit are guilty of blackmarketeering.
Those engaging in the widespread practice of stealing sugar and
other raw materials for making alcohol from state enterprises and
i
collective farms are guilty of serious theft crimes.
C. Drugs
As late as April 1986,. however, Soviet publications were
denying that there was a drug problem in the Soviet Union. An
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article in Meditsinskaia gazeta by the head of a course in Soviet
law at a medical institute stated: "Drug addiction exists on a
comparatively small scale in the Soviet Union. Not a single
instance of the use of heroin, cocaine or LSD-type drugs has been
recorded in our country in the past decade.n102 By January 1987,
a very different story was appearing in the Soviet press. A.V.
Vlasov, the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs, gave an interview
to Pravda in which he indicated that the Soviet Union indeed had
a substantial drug problem. He stated that "46,000 people are on
the books with a medical diagnosis of drug addiction."1" He
called for tough limits on wild hemp, on poppy growing, for more
police action against pushers, and for identification and
treatment of users. Police, agricultural, and health officials
repeated these thoughts in interviews in an article published in
August 1987.1" As a drug crime prevention measure, in the fall
of 1987 the government ordered an end to the cultivation of opium
poppies 105
The police mounted a highly publicized campaign against
drugs, which were reported to be directly or indirectly
responsible for 40,000 crimes a year.1" They were reported to
be using helicopters and airplanes for spotting drug
plantings.107
Because of the previous suppression of information about
drug addiction, it is hard to know to what extent there is a
stepup in the anti-drug campaign, as opposed to a stepup in the
publicity about the campaign. One factor which could have led to
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a major anti-drug campaign could have been worry about spreading
of AIDS among drug addicts through contaminated needles and from
addicts into the general heterosexual population. While Soviet
authorities have announced a crash program to produce disposable
needles, at present needles are still in short supply, meaning
that needle sharing must be common among intravenous drug
addicts.
D. Prostitution
There has also been a much more open discussion of
prostitution. Articles appeared with detailed information on
this previously taboo topic, decrying the absence of criminal
penalties.108 Legislation in 1987 made prostitution illegal, but
placed it in the category of a minor administrative offense (like
a traffic violation), rather than a criminal offense. The
maximum fine was set at 100 rubles for the first offense and 200
for succeeding offenses.1" In October 1987, Komsomol'skaia
pravda, published a letter to the editors linking prostitution to
AIDS and saying that the new administrative measures were
laughable. .If medical research should establish that there is a
substantial link between prostitution and AIDS in the Soviet
Union, and if the present administrative measures prove as
ineffective as their critics suggest, the proponents of criminal
sanctions for prostitution are likely to have their way.
E. Spreading AIDS
Worry about AIDS is now been reflected in various aspects of
Soviet criminal law. The severe crackdown on drugs and tentative
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steps against prostitution both may reflect leadership concern
about the spread of AIDS. The lack of official enthusiasm for
the legalization of homosexual conduct may also reflect this same
concern. Worry about AIDS has led to the definition of a new
criminal offense, putting another at risk of AIDS infection, has
been added to Soviet criminal legislation. An amendment to labor
camp legislation will allow the segregation of those infected
with the AIDS virus.
At its meeting of August 13, 1987, the Politburo "approved
additional measures aimed at preventing the outbreak of AIDS in
our country and deepening international cooperation in the battle
against this disease."-
An Edict These enacting these "additional measures" was
adopted on August 25, 1987. It included the following
provisions:
To establish that knowing placing of another person at
risk of infection with the disease AIDS--
shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term
of up to five years.
Infection of another person with the disease AIDS by a
person knowing that he has this disease,--
Shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term
of up to eight years.111
Amendments to the legislation governing labor camps adopted
?
in 1987 provided for the establishment of segregated camps for
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convicts suffering from infectious diseases. This legislation
would make it possible to avoid the spread of AIDS through sexual
contact in the camps.112
F. Videopiracy
Soviet criminal law has had to deal with one major new
technological development--the video cassette recorder. The
recorder threatens the government policy of restricting and
controlling both the media and private business operations. A
high percentage of foreign videotapes would be pornographic by
strait-laced Soviet standards. Copying them would thus violate
the criminal code provisions on pornography. Video pornography
prosecutions have been reported in the Soviet press.113 Videotape
copiers could also be liable for anti-Soviet agitation and
propaganda, and for violation of the new "anti-Rambo" law that
forbids distributing tapes dedicated to the "cult of violence and
cruelty. H114 This law adds the following article to the RSFSR
Criminal Code:
Article 228-1. Preparation of Distribution of Works
Propagandizing the Cult of Violence and Cruelty
The preparation, distribution showing, or, possession
with the purpose of distribution or showing of films and
videotapes or other works propagandizing the Cult of
violence and cruelty ,--
shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term
?
of up to two years or by corrective tasks for the same
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period, or by a fine of up to three hundred rubles with the
confiscation of the works and the means of their preparation
and demonstration.
Persons making videotapes for sale or reselling tapes at a profit
are also subject to persecution under the laws governing black
market activities. Video violators are hard to catch because
they commit victimless crimes in the privacy of their apartments.
Thus the criminal law alone cannot control illicit private tape
distribution. Not surprisingly therefore the criminal law
approach is being supplemented by the efforts of Soviet customs
and postal services, which are taking various measures to control
the inflow of undesirable tapes into the country.115
G. The Economy
Generations of Soviet leaders have tried to use criminal law
to attack problems in the Soviet economy, but with little
success. The problems at which their criminal measures have been
aimed are symptomatic of fundamental flaws in the economic
system. The economic forces creating the criminal behavior are
so strong that it is no easy task for the legal system to deal
with them.
One serious economic problem is the practice of "report-
padding" (pripiski). Soviet managers, under intense pressure to
fulfill plans, routinely exaggerate their performance reports.
The result is that they receive undeserved bonuses, national
economic planning proceeds on faulty data, and they keep their
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jobs despite poor real performances. Their superiors often
tolerate this abuse since the superiors' own wbrk is evaluated on
the basis of the aggregate of work reported by subordinate
organizations. Law enforcement agencies must engage in a
continuing struggle with report-padding. Much of what happened
in this area under Gorbachev occurred so early in his tenure that
it must have been planned before he took office, and must have
involved the unthinking continuation of old policy.
In June 1985 The USSR Supreme Court issued an order binding
on all lower courts explaining how the law on report-padding was
to be interpreted. This order added little new to similar orders
previously adopted on the subject by the Court. There was,
however, a shift in emphasis, with pressure put on the courts to
convict not the lower level employees who had physically made the
false book entries, but rather the higher level management who
had engineered the report-padding scheme.116 An '
authoritative summary of judicial practice in report-padding
cases, published in the last issue for 1985 of 'the Bulletin of
the Supreme Court of the USSR, provided the lower courts a
practical guide to the law of report-padding. This summary
emphasized again that responsibility was to be placed on top
management, not ordinary employees.117
Production of poor quality goods is closely related to
report padding. It is another way of simulating plan performance
without fulfilling the spirit of the plan. Because Soviet
pricing and plan indicator systems do not take adequate account
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of the quality of goods, and because there is no free market
which would reject low quality aoods, it is necessary for the
authorities to bring direct pressure on enterprise managers to
make them produce good quality goods. The most notable recent
step in this direction has been Gorbachev's system of "state
acceptance," wnich involves having factory output checked bv an
independent quality control organization. However, there has
long been on the books legislation making production of poor
quality goods a criminal offense. Detailed instructions for the
application of this legislation were given in a USER Supreme
Court order dated April 5, 1985.118 A follow up article in the
of the cucreme.Court of the USSR encouraged courts to
take a strict attitude toward management who produced poor
cualitv coods.118 These exhortations, however, do not appear to
have made any sicnificant
reports of application of
chances in prior practice. Almost no
criminal legislation on quality appear
in the Soviet press, though complaints
do appear
from
time to
time that the legislation is underenforced.
In addition to indirect forms of cheating the government by
exaggerating the quantity and quality of goods produced, there
are more direct forms, whereby accounting books, and salary and
bonus payments aie manipulated to line the pockets of dishonest
managers. These last forms of cheating, along with tn taking of
bribes, are the object of the anticorruption campaign described
above.
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Recently, Soviet commentators have been coming to the
conclusion that the application of criminal law to economic
matters may be making a bad situation worse. A paradox of Soviet
criminal law is that although the laws against padding of reports
and manipulation of compensation are relatively ineffective to
prevent the problems to which they are addressed, they are quite
effective to obstruct innovative management techniques. Any new
incentive scheme developed at the local level is likely to fall
afoul of this criminal legislation. Along with the perennial
calls for more severe enforcement of criminal legislation against
cheaters in the economy, new voices are speaking out ever more
often under Gorbachev, asking that care be taken not to stifle
initiative by overzealous criminal law enforcement. One area in
which major changes may well be underway is that involving the
drawing of the line between criminal acts by management and
legitimate innovative entrepreneurial activity. While the Soviet
press, in numerous articles cited above in the section on
corruption, has lauded the efforts of procurators and courts to
prosecute corrupt and thieving officials, the same press has
taken quite a different attitude toward prosecution of officials
who stretched the law, not for personal gain, but to create
better organizational and incentive systems. It has favored
these officials and has criticized those law enforcement
organizations that have stifled initiative in the name of
enforcing the law. A number of articles criticized the criminal
prosecution of managers collective farms and other organizations'
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that had found themselves in a legal no man's land when they
hired outside construction teams ("shabashniki") to do essential
work that could not be completed in any other manner.120 In an
interview in Izvestia, USSR Procurator General Rekunkov also
warned of the dangers of treating high incomes as criminal,
saying there should be a way for those who work hard to earn a
lot of money.121 The matter was also taken up in a discussion
between Supreme Court members and legal scholars reported in the
Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The legal scholars
argued that the courts should be cautious so that daring
innovators would not find themselves accused of economic
criMes.122 A decision published in the Bulletin in 1987 took the
same line. The headnote of this decision read, "Criminal
responsibility for abuse of official position is impossible if
the action of the guilty party is not connected with mercenary or
other personal interest."-23 Also in 1987, the labor authorities
attempted to clarify the situation by providing clearer
guidelines for innovative pay schemes.124
H. Blackmarketeering
The basic cause of blackmarketeering is the unavailability
or underpricing of goods and services through official channels.
Criminal prosecution of blackmarketeering thus treats the
symptoms rather than the disease. The problem is made worse by
the fact that excessive zeal in prosecution of blackmarketeers
can deprive citizens of access to products they need. For
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instance, the only way peasants can get crops they grow to market
is by bribing truck drivers to carry them on trucks owned by
state enterprises. Overenforcement of the law in this area can
lead to urban food shortages, as Pravda has pointed out.125
While there may have been some increase in tolerance for such
essential blackmarket activities, there has been no increased
tolerance for ordinary blackmarketeers under Gorbachev. However,
greater care has been taken to distinguish blackmarketeers from
persons engaged in legitimate private labor activities. In 1985,
the USSR Supreme Court issued a clarifying order designed to
prevent certain legitimate activities, such. as growing vegetables
under a sharecrop arrangement, from being misclassified as
blackmarketeering.126
The relation of two packages of legislation passed in 1986
to blackmarketeering requires some explanation. These are the
legislation against "non-labor income" passed in the spring of
1986127 and the law on individual enterprise passed in the late
fall of the same year.128 Some commentators saw this succession
of legislative acts as involving a vacillation in Gorbachev's
policy toward private income. Actually, both laws were drafted
simultaneously; issues connected with them had long been under
discussion by Soviet legal scholars. The two sets of legislation
are not necessarily inconsistent. Each attacks the black market
but in different ways. The laws on "non-labor income" attempt to
restrict black market activity directly. The legislation on
individual enterprise, by expanding the list of permitted and
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taxed activities, seeks to tame and regulate certain activities,
thus transferring them from the black market to the mainstream
economy.
I. Disastrous Accidents
Under Gorbachev, the longstanding policy of bringing
criminal charges against those responsible for disastrous
accidents has continued. The main change is that as a result of
"glasnost11' there is more press coverage. The two major
accidents to be reported in
nuclear catastrophe and the
the Soviet press
collision of two
Sea. In each case, those deemed responsible
in labor camps.129
were the
ships in
received
Chernobyl
the Black
long terms
J. Military Discipline
There was one slight change in military criminal law, with
an expansion, in 1985, of the cases in which convicted military
personnel could be assigned to disciplinary battalions in lieu of
ordinary punishment. Obviously the fact that a disciplinary
battalion might face combat in Afghanistan would increase the
deterrent effect of such an assignment, given the Soviet
tradition of using disciplinary battalions for the most dangerous
combat tasks.13? The Afghan was may have also increased the need
for disciplinary battalions.
K. State Security
While the legislature made only one relatively minor change
in Soviet legislation on state security under Gorbachev, the
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press regularly reported on security-related activities of the
KGB. The USSR acceded to the international convention on
hostage-taking, and amended its criminal legislation to provide
for punishment in cases of hostage-taking with international
elements, so as to conform to the requirements of the
convention.131 The KGB appeared in the press in connection with
the Daniloff case132 and in connection with the prosecution as
war criminals of persons who had sided with the Nazis during the
Second World War.133 A foreign student in Armenia was convicted
of subversive activities and expelled from the USSR.134 As
mentioned above, those responsible for violence in the Alma Ata
?
riots were cOnvicted and given severe sentences.135
L. Juvenile Crime
There has been one significant change in punishment measures
applicable to juveniles, the development of legislation allowing
retention of offenders in juvenile institutions until the age of
twenty rather than eighteen. This change will be discussed in
further detail below, as an example of the application of social
science to corrections policy. The Supreme Court has also issued
a decree demanding that the special procedural guarantees for
juveniles be better enforced in practice and that there be a
crackdown on juvenile access to liquor.135
V. Amnesties and Rehabilitation
Two major amnesties have occurred in the period 1985-1988.
In 1985 there was an amnesty in honor of the fortieth anniversarY
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of Soviet victory in World War 11.137 In June 1987, the Supreme
Soviet adopted an amnesty in honor of the seventieth anniversary
of the October Revolution.138 The 1985 amnesty must have been
largely drafted during the pre-Gorbachev era. It was a
relatively limited amnesty compared to the quite far-reaching
1988 amnesty. In addition to these two legislated amnesties,
there was an informal amnesty in 1987 of dissidents serving terms
for slandering the Soviet system.
The 1985 amnesty in honor of World War II victory freed or
reduced sentences for veterans, labor heroes of the home front,
wives and widows of disabled veterans, and war widows. It also
freed various categories of persons not connected with the war:
pregnant women and women with minor children, men who were
disabled or over 60, and some juvenile offenders. Other
offenders with short sentences had the remainder of their
sentences commuted to freedom with compulsory assignment to
labor. Dissidents serving sentences for slandering the state or
illegal religious activities were specifically excluded from this
amnesty as from previous amnesties. The 1985 amnesty essentially
represented no change from the policy of various amnesties under
Brezhnev. Offenders who presented little danger to society were
freed. Serious offenders and dissidents were excluded from the
amnesty. The exact choice of whom to free seems tO have been
based on social science findings concerning the benefits of
'compulsory" assignment to work over imprisonment for the
?
rehabilitation of minor offenders. An additional element was
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probably the desire to encourage patriotism by showing the Soviet
public that veterans would be singled out for particular favors.
The exclusion of dissidents followed the pattern of earlier
amnesties.
In February 1987, the Soviet press reported that forty
persons convicted under Art. 70 (Anti-Soviet Agitation and
Propaganda) and Article 190-1 (Distribution of Knowingly Untrue
Fabrications Slandering the Soviet State and Social Order) of the
RSFSR Criminal Code had made statements have made statements
promising to desist from illegal activity. The Presidium of the
USSR Supreme Soviet formally decided to release them as a "humane
act" in the spirit of "perestroika."139 The June 1987 amnesty
(discussed in detail below) included some persons imprisoned for
dissident speech and for illegal religious activity. The freeing
of dissidents was a bold new step for the current regime and
marked a sharp turn with the policy of its predecessors. While
the number of individuals affected was not large, the message to
the public was an important one, and a major encouragement to
freer speech.
The 1987 amnesty freed categories of persons quite similar
to those freed by the 1985 amendment. The 1987 amnesty freed all
veterans "of the defense of the Soviet motherland", not just
World War II veterans. As before pregnant women, Women with
minor children, the elderly and invalids were given their
freedom. Women and minors serving short sentences who had served
specified portions of their sentences were released. Sentences
?
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for various types of crimes presenting little danger to society
were reduced. Besides respect for veterans, the amnesty, like
the 1985 amnesty, reflected social science findings on the
categories of criminals that could safely be released early. As
in earlier amnesties, those convicted of serious crimes against
the state were excluded. Contrary to the practice in earlier
amnesties, persons meeting the general qualifications for amnesty
were given the benefits of the 1987 amnesty even if they were
guilty of dissident activities under the following articles of
the RSFSR Criminal Code (or similar articles of the codes of
other republics): Article 190-1 (Distribution of Fabrications
Known to be False Defaming the Soviet State and Social System),
Article 190-2 (Descration of the State Seal or Flag), Article
190-3 (Organization of, or Active Participation in, Group
Activities Violating Public Order). Also contrary to prior
practice, religious offenders were given amnesty benefits even if
they were guilty of violating the following articles of the RSFSR
Criminal Code (or similar articles of the codes of other
republics): Article 142 (Violation of the Laws on Separation of
the Church from the State and the School from the Church),
Article 227 (Infringement of the Personality and Rights of
Citizens under the Guise of Performing Religious Rites). Like
the release of dissidents earlier in 1987, this application of
the amnesty to political and religious dissidents was a green
light for more free speech and was an important step toward
improving the international image of the Soviet Union.
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Another important symbol of change has been the
rehabilitation of many famous victims of Stalin's purges,
including all major political figures except the infamous
Yagoda.-40 The rehabilitation of figures such as Bukharin and
Chayanov, who had opposed Stalin's economic policies is
particularly important in symbolizing the greater freedom o
speech now being allowed on economic questions. Reports of the
rehabilitation of ordinary victims of Stalin's purges who were
not properly rehabilitated under Gorbachev's predecessors serve
to darken his predecessors' reputation.141
VI. Applying Social Science Findings to Penal Policy
A. Introduction
Under Gorbachev, Soviet legislators have adopted no major
changes in either the criminal codes, which define crimes and
specify the applicable punishments or the criminal procedure
codes, which specify pretrial, court, and appeal procedures.
However, they have adopted a number of moderately significant
changes in the legislation on corrections procedures, which
specify the details of confinement in labor camps or other forms
of punishment. Policymakers appear to have attempted to employ
the findings of Soviet social scientists about the effect of
various types of punishment on recidivism. They also seem to
have attempted to improve the economic productivity of those held
under confinement. Both policies had their origins in the
Brezhnev years. The changes under Gorbachev involve the
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application in practice of theories introduced in the Brezhnev
period, a time when penologists had considerable financial
support. for their research and considerable freedom to publish
recommendations for reform in specialized legal journals. The
proponents of these theories have continued to push them strongly
under Gorbachev, moving from legal journals to the public
press.142
Major amendments occurred in 1985 in legislation on criminal
penalties.143 The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet formally
adopted these amendments on April 2, 1985. They are highly
complex, and thus must have been in the drafting process for a
considerable period before their adoption. Further amendments,
of a more limited nature, were adopted in October 1987.
B. The 1985 Amendments
The purpose of the 1985 amendments is explained in an
excellent article by a Moscow State University law professor)-44
They allow the separation of first offenders and less dangerous
offenders from hardened criminals. They provide for a
substantial expansion of the use of "colony settlements." These
are essentially penal villages where the convicts cannot leave
and must work at assigned jobs, but are free of the extreme
restrictions of labor camps. Social science data has shown that
they are more effective than labor camps in the rehabilitation of
the less serious offenders. They are probably also economically
more effective. Previous law had provided for the routine
transfer of juvenile offenders to regular labor camps when they 8
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reached the age of 18. The 1985 legislation authorized???
retention of juveniles in juvenile detention facilities up to the
age of 20, to prevent mixing them with the hardened criminals in
the regular labor camps.
The 1985 legislation makes it possible for courts to allow
persons given compulsory assignments to work in replacement of
suspended sentences of deprivation of freedom to travel to their
assigned place of work on their own rather than in a prison
convoy under guard, thus saving the state considerable costs and
saving the convict considerable discomfort.
From various indicators, it appears that current sentencing
policy is making substantially greater use of suspended sentences
with compulsory assignment to work.145 The Supreme Court has
issued- sortie detailed rulings on the application of this type of
punishment 146
C. The 1987 Amendments
The 1987 amendments introduce a number of relatively minor
changes into the Fundamental Principles of Corrective Labor
Legislation and the Corrective Labor Codes of the Republics.147
The only interesting change is one which would allow the creation
of special labor camps to isolate those infected with the AIDS
virus. No specific mention is made of AIDS, but provision is
made for a new category of labor camps "designated for the
custody, and treatment of persons with an infectious illness."
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Technical changes seem largely to be designed to give
corrections administrators somewhat greater flexibility in the
management of prisoners. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and
the Procuracy are explicitly given the power to make rules as to
when first-time offenders will be sent to corrective labor
institutes outside their republics. A change is made in the
category of offenders who can, with their consent, be kept in the
investigative prison to do housekeeping work rather than being
sent to labor camps. The rules on minors are changed to allow
minors sentenced to a "general regime" camp to be transferred
upon reaching age 18 to a "strengthened [harsher] regime
depending upon various factors, including their conduct.
Presumably the availability of this threat will ease the problems
of camp discipline. The rules for those in camps of a special
[especially harsh] regime are changed to abolish the requirement
that they be kept in cells. Especially dangerous criminals and
those whose death penalty has been commuted must still be kept in
cells. This change is related to changes on rewards and
penalties for prisoners and gives the camp administration greater
flexibility in rewarding prisoners by letting them out of cells
or of disciplining them by putting them into cells. The
provisions on labor are amended to provide for the issuance of
"Rules of Internal Labor Order" for prisoners.
camp"
VII. Proposed Social Science Based Corrections Law Reform
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Two proposed reforms of Soviet corrections law are based on
social science theories. One would involve reorienting labor
camps from emphasis on economic plan fulfillment to emphasis on
rehabilitation. The other would involve the addition of
compulsory assignment to labor to sentences of banishment.
The press has published criticism of the orientation of
labor camps for juveniles, accusing the camp administrations of
putting more emphasis on fulfilling production plans than on
rehabilitation.148 A model lenient camp has been praised by a
periodical aimed mainly at foreign readers.148 In 1987,
Literaturnaia cazeta published a very critical letter from an
adult labor camp inmate on life in the camp.150 This, of course,
has been a virtually taboo subject since soon after the
publication under Khrushchev of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich."
When in November 1987, the USSR Minister of Justice
announced that the revision of criminal law under way would
eliminate the punishments of exile and banishment, the Western
press overreacted.181 The press treated this as (1) a surprise
and (2) a major softening of Soviet criminal penalties. In fact,
the abolition of exile and banishment was a reform supported by
Soviet scholars, who based their support on hard sociological
research data. The scholars' demand however was substitution of
harsher punishment for exile and banishment. They wanted to
continue to send criminals to remote localities, but rather than
leaving them free to roam without jobs, to confine them to penal.
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settlements or at least to require them to work at particular
jobs.
Far back into Russian history and throughout the Soviet
period, courts have sentenced defendants to exile (sending them
to live in a designated locality) and banishment (sending them
away from a particular locality). Serious doubts about this
policy were expressed long ago.152 In recent years, the courts
have curtailed their use of these punishments as the result of
the influence of sociological studies on Soviet sentencing
policy. A 1983 publication of the Institute of State and Law of
the Soviet Academy of Sciences explained:
In the legislation and judicial practice of the USSR both
types of punishment [exile and banishment] occupy a
secondary position. Research by Soviet scholars has shown
that in judicial practice only isolated instances of the
application of these measures are encountered and that at
the present time they are insufficiently effective. The
proportion of recidivism after the completion of such
punishment is around 25%, which greatly exceeds the
recidivism rate for all other types of punishment not
connected with deprivation of freedom. The scholars
consider that the basic cause of the insufficient
effectiveness both of exile and of banishment consists of
the fact that far from all the persons to whom these
punishments have been applied have been involved in
socially-useful work)-53
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With the decline in exile and banishment as punishment has come a
growth in the use mentioned above, of imposition of a suspended
sentence with compulsory assignment to labor and in the use of
sentences to "settlements" rather than to labor camps. Both
these approaches achieve the same goal of removal of the convict
from the community where he was committing crimes, but they add
the element of forced labor to the exile. Even without a
specific sentence of banishment, any long sentence imposed on a
resident of a major city, may carry with it an implicit sentence
of banishment, since a convict's residence permit is
automatically cancelled if he is given .a sentence of over six
months. There has been some complaint in the Soviet press about
the problem of a vagrant class being created by this practice of
cancelling residence permits of convicts.154
VIII. Statistics on Crime
A. General Trends in Criminal Convictions
Since the early days of Stalin's power, the Soviet censors
have prohibited the publication of systematic statistics on
crime. Fragmentary data on particular crimes or particular
regions of the country has been released from time to time. A
Dutch researcher has done a remarkable job of gathering and
interpreting this fragmentary data, but his book and a detailed
follow-up article, the only usable compendia of Soviet judicial
statistics.155 This Dutch scholar summarizes the criminal
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statistics for the period (1980-84) immediately before Gorbachev
became first secretary as follows:
Taken together, these data show that in the second half
of the 1970s, the number of sentences remained fairly
stable at a level of some 800,000 sentences annually.
During 1980, it started to increase probably by about
5-10% at first and by some 25% during 1982. Thereafter
it stabilized at a level of 1,050,000 or some 35%
higher than was the case in the second half of 1970s.
In October, 1987, Izvestia published an article that
provided information of a type that had previously been secret,
but which fell far short of providing a full statistical picture
of the crime situation. This article read as follows:
In the Ministry of Justice of the USSR
The Ministry of Justice of the USSR has consider the
question of the work of the courts for the first six months
of the current year.
According to the statistical reports of the courts,
among those convicted there were less persons who had
committed crimes in a state of intoxication. Violations of
safety rules for the movement of means of transportation
were reduced--10,562 persons where convicted for this type
of crime with serious consequences, which was 18.6 percent
less than in the preceding year.
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In the country as a whole, there were less instances of
violent crimes against the individual, there was a reduction
in hooliganistic phenomena, particularly in the RSFSR,
Belorussia, Kirgizia, and Armenia. 4,682 persons where
convicted of intentional homicide; 53,008 of all types of
hooliganism.
At the same time there continues to be a high level of
encroachments on socialist and personal property. In the
first half of this year, 64,231 persons were convicted of
theft of state or social property; 63,574 persons were
found guilty of the theft of personal property of citizens.
These crimes were .most widespread in Kazakhstan, Moldavia,
and Estonia.
The conviction rate for home-distilling of hard liquor
for sale rose by 39 percent. This particularly relates to a
number of oblasts of the RSFSR, and also to the Ukraine and
Kazakhstan.
More crimes were uncovered connected with narcotics and
the number of persons convicted for these crimes increased
accordingly. For instance, in the Uzbek SSR 1,473 persons
were convicted, which is 62 percent more than in the first
half of the past year. There was a growth of those
convicted in Moldavia and Latvia.
The data of judicial statistics are being analyzed by
specialists.
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The results of the analytic work will be used for
raising the effectiveness of prevention of violations of the
law.158
While the publication of this short list of statistics is a step
in the direction of "glasnost'," it leaves much to be desired.
The vast majority of crimes are omitted. The article provides
little comparative historical data even for those crimes that are
listed.
The Moscow Chief of Police has begun conducting weekly
briefings in which he gives fairly detailed crime statistics for
the city of Moscow.157
B. Specific Types of Crime
1. Crimes Against the State
While on his visit to the United States in December 1987,
General Secretary Gorbachev stated that only 22 persons were
being held under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code.158
2. Religious Offenses
No data appear to have been published on the number of
persons convicted of religious offenses. While the June 1987
amnesty freed some persons convicted of religious offenses,
religious offenders have not enjoyed special treatment comparable
to that given to persons convicted under Article 70. The Soviet
press has reported one case involving severe punishment for an
underground religious publisher.188
3. 'Crimes of Violence
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One of the successes of the anti-alcohol policy appears to
have been a reduction in the number of crimes of violence. The
official report quoted above stated with respect to violent
crimes:
In the country as a whole, there were less instances of
violent crimes against the individual, there was a reduction
in hooliganistic phenomena, particularly in the RSFSR,
Belorussia, Kirgizia, and Armenia. 4,682 persons where
convicted of intentional homicide; 53,008 of all types of
hooliganism.
4. Theft Crimes
a. Theft of State and other "Socialist" Property
In the period immediately preceding Gorbachev's becoming
First Secretary, there was a sharp increase in the number of
convictions for the theft of state and other socialist property.
This paragraph is based upon two articles by S. Gusev, First
Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR.160
Unfortunately some key language in these two articles is
ambiguous. Literally, it seems to refer to all thefts, but
interpreted in the light of the context, it appears more likely
to refer only to thefts of state or other "socialist" property."
He said that these thefts were up by 49.2% in 1981-1985 over
those for 1971-1975. In the first half of 1986, Gusev stated,
"the level of convictions for theft continued to increase." The
1987 Ministry of Justice announcement stated, "there continues to
be a high level of encroachments on socialist . . . property. If:
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the first half of this year [1987], 64,231 persons were convicted
n
of theft of state or social property . . . l61 This figure does
not include minor thefts of state and social property, .which are
handled by an administrative procedure rather than through the
criminal courts.
sanctions imposed
year. Presumably
1986 and 1987.
The number of convictions for large
There were over 950,000 such administrative
in 1981-1985, or over 190,000 such cases a
the sanctions continued at the same level in
and extremely large
thefts of state and other "socialist" property grew even more
sharply in the immediate pre-Gorbachev period. It rose in 1981-
1985 by 55.8% over the figure for 1976-1980. According to Gusev,
this sharp increase was largely due to better work by law
enforcement officials. Gusev went on to say
quantities the courts give almost 70% of the
sentences, and for thefts in extremely large
for theft in large
guilty parties long
quantities, the
courts gave almost all the defendants long sentences. While the
press has not published statistics for cases of large scale theft
for 1986 and 1987, there is every reason, from the prevalence of
press reports of individual cases, to suppose that the campaign
against such thefts that began under Andropov has continued under
Gorbachev.
b. Theft of Other Property
According to the Ministry of Justice, "there continues to be
a high level of encroachments on . . . and personal property. In
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the first half of this year [1987], . . . 63,574 persons were
found guilty of the theft of personal property of citizens."
5. "Hooliganism"
The Criminal Code defines "Hooliganism" is defined by the
criminal code "intentional actions, grossly violating social
order and expressing a clear disrespect toward society." In
practice, persons convicted of this crime would be considered to
be "drunk and disorderly" in the United States. A success of the
anti-alcohol campaign has been the reduction of this type of
crime. According to the Ministry of Justice, the courts
convicted 53,008 of all types of hooliganism in the first half of
1987, which was a reduction as compared to 1986.
6. Election Fraud
With the appearance of a few contested elections under
Gorbachev's policy of "demokratizatsiia," a news report has
appeared of a conviction for election fraud.162
7. Criminal Traffic Violations
One of the successes of the anti-alcohol program .has been a
reduction in the number of drunken drivers. The Ministry of
Justice reports that, " Violations of safety rules for the
movement of means of transportation were reduced [in the first
half of 1987]-10,562 persons were convicted for this type of
crime with serious consequences, which was 18.6 percent less than
in the preceding year [1986].
8. Home Distilling
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The vast increase in convictions for home distilling as a
result of the anti-alcohol campaign, and the subsequent
decriminalization of first offense home distilling has been
discussed above.
9. Labor Camp Population
Despite promises of more openness, the authorities have
continued the long-standing policy of prohibiting the
publications of statistics on labor camp population. Following
an approach developed by the Dutch scholar van den Berg, it is
possible, however, to arrive at some estimate of the number of
persons sentenced to a labor camp each year. According to a
statement by USSR Minister of Internal Affairs A.V. Vlasov, "in
the country as a whole, criminality decreased during 1986 by 4.6%
in comparison with the year 1985." He said that homicides were
down by 21.7%; grave injuries by 24%, open stealing and robberies
by 25%. Since these crimes which fell in number were crimes for
which labor camp 'sentences are typically imposed, one might
expect in the long run a proportionate fall in the number of
labor camp inmates. Van den Berg estimates that the labor camp
population will soon level off at about 1,200,000, if current
policies are followed.163
10. The Death Penalty
The death penalty continues in relatively wide use. Under
Soviet law, courts may apply the death penalty not only for
crimes of violence, such as murder, but also for large scale
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theft of state property. One feature of the anti-corruption
campaign under Gorbachev has been the use of the death penalty
against relatively high officials, including the First Secretary
of the Buhkhara Party Committee and the Uzbek Republic Minister
of the Cotton-Processing Industry,164 as well as against ordinary
economic criminals, such as a bookkeeper who stole 327,000
rubles-65 crooked local retail trade officials.166 These death
penalties received wide publicity in newspapers ?such as Pravda
and Izvestia. The Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the USSR
reported the Uzbek cotton case in detail. There can hardly have
been an executive or a lawyer in the USSR who did not learn that
the death penalty was being used actively against corrupt
officials. It seems unlikely that the USSR Procurator's Office
would decide on its own to request the death penalty against a
former oblast' Party first secretary or a former republic cabinet
ministers. Thus, presumably, the use of the death penalty in
such cases has been approved at the highest level of Soviet
authority.
The death penalty continues to be used against particularly
dangerous murderers. Thus for instance the Bulletin of the
Supreme Court of the USSR reported the imposition of a death
sentence against G.M. Mikhasevich,
murders, rapes, and robberies.167
In at least two cases with political implications the
prosecutor sought and obtained the death penalty. K. Ryskulbekov
who had committed a number of
was sentenced to death for killing a people's volunteer police
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aide in the Alma Ata riots.168 Federenko was tried and executed
as a war criminal.169
IX. Plans for Technical Law Reform
From a purely technical point of view, Soviet criminal
legislation badly needs revision. The criminal legislation now
in effect first appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s. New
legislation has introduced hundreds of amendments into the codes.
The USSR and Republic Supreme Courts have issued volumes of
instructions on the interpretation of the codes. The result is
that the codes no longer fulfill their purpose of providing a
clear, comprehensive, logically-organized guide to the law. In
the 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet lawmakers and legal scholars
cooperated in the technical redrafting of legislation in many
areas of the law, and in a massive project to publish Code of
Laws (Svod zakonov) for the USSR and for each of the republics.
The redrafting and updating of criminal legislation is a logical
continuation of this policy.
The legislative plan for the Russian Republic for 1987-
1990170 calls for the preparation of the draft of a new Criminal
Code for the Republic.171 The plan designates the following
organizations to participate in the drafting process: the
Presidium of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, the RSFSR Ministry of
Justice, the RSFSR Procuracy, the RSFSR Supreme Court, and the
Ministry of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR. There is little doubt
that there will be a new criminal code within the next few years.
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The current USSR plan for drafting legislation172 does not
include a section on drafting criminal law in general. Despite
the lack of mention of criminal law revision in the plan, active
preparation of new criminal legislation is taking place at the
USSR level. This was revealed in a statement by the USSR
Minister of Justice, Boris V. Kravtsov, in an interview with
TASS.173 Scholars at the Institute of State and Law have
prepared new draft criminal legislation and expect to take an
active part in the preparation of any new criminal codes. The
USSR legislative plan does include provisions for preparing a
USSR Law on State Security, to be prepared by the Ministry of
Justice, the KGB, the Ministry of Defense, the Procuracy, the
Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the USSR Academy of Sciences.
This law may contain provisions amending or replacing provisions
of the Law on State Crimes, which is repeated verbatim in the
Republic criminal codes. That some amendment to this law is
under consideration was indicated in a statement by Soviet
Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov in February 1987,
when he said there was a possibility of the repeal of the law on
"anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
The Russian Republic legislative plan also calls for the
drafting of revisions to the criminal procedure code, but does
not call for a new criminal procedure code. Relatively few
amendments have been made in the RSFSR Criminal Procedure Code
since its adoption in 1960. Therefore, from a purely technical
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point of view, it is far less in need of revision than the
Criminal Code.
The major unanswered question at this point is whether the
new criminal code and revised procedural code will amount to more
than technically improved recodifications of existing
legislation. The answer will depend upon the fate of various
proposed changes in criminal legislation that "liberal" criminal
law reformers are now taking advantage of "glasnost'" to propose
in the press.
X. Liberal Law Reform?
A. Introduction
Glasnost' has made it possible for a number of criminal law
specialists who could be classified as "academic liberals" to
publish proposals for the reform of criminal law, criminal
procedure, and punishment. The proposals to be discussed here
would not cost a significant amount of money, would not have a
major effect on the crime rate, and would not affect the
authority of the Politburo. Their adoption would significantly
improve the international image of the Soviet legal system. The
debate is of a kind quite familiar to Americans--liberal law
professor against conservatives and some law enforcement
officials.174
B. Dissidents
The Soviet criminal justice system has a very poor image
outside the Soviet Union, an image that undoubtedly has a
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negative effect on the overall ability of the Soviet Union to
achieve its foreign policy goals. It has also had a poor image
at home, thus reducing the legitimacy of the Soviet authorities
in the eyes of their own people. A number of measures have been
taken under Gorbachev to improve this image. The courts have
including the
Most notable has
rehabilitated many victims of Stalin's purges
prominent defendants of the 1938 show trials.
been the partial rehabilitation of Bukharin.
The government
set up a Human Rights Commission. Rejected applicants for
emigration may now file formal appeals. However, perhaps the
has
most significant change with respect to the international image
of the Soviet Union has been the release of a number of
dissidents, the reduction in the use of the criminal law against
dissidents, and the announcement of impending softening of
criminal sanctions on dissident speech. However, despite all
this activity, there has been absolutely no change to date in the
criminal legislation on the books. Current discussion involves
two articles of the RSFSR Criminal Code (and by implication
similar articles of the codes of the other republics). These are
Articles 70 and 190-1, which read as follows:
Article 70. Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda
Agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of
subverting or weakening the Soviet regime or of committing
particular, especially dangerous crimes against the state,
or the circulation, for the same purpose, of slanderous
fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system,
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or the circulation or preparation or keeping, for the same
purpose of literature of such content, shall be punished by
deprivation of freedom for a term of six months to seven
years, with or without additional exile for a term of two to
five years, or by exile for a term of two to five years.
The same actions committed by a person previously
convicted of especially dangerous crimes against the state
or committed in wartime shall be punished by deprivation of
freedom for a term of three to ten years,. with or without
additional exile for a term of two to five years.
Article 190-1. Circulations of Fabrications Known to be
False That Defame the Soviet State and Social
System
The systematic circulation in oral form of fabrications
known to be false that defame the Soviet state and social
system and also, the preparation or circulation in written,
printed or any other form of works of such content shall be
punished by deprivation of freedom for a term not exceeding
three years, or by correctional tasks for a term not
exceeding one year, or by a fine not exceeding 100 rubles.
Article 190-1 differs from Article 70 in that Article 190-1 omits
the requirement that the activity be "for the purpose of
subverting or weakening the Soviet regime or of committing
particular, especially dangerous crimes against the state." In *
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the past year, Soviet legal scholars have repeatedly pointed that
Article 190-1 punishes conduct done without the intent to harm
the state. Leading criminal law scholars who have spoken on the
subject have been unanimous in suggesting the abolition of
Article 190-1, but have generally suggested that Article 70
should be retained for use in case of serious threats to the
state. Particularly outspoken have been criminal law Professors
Sofia Kelina and Aleksandr Iakovlev of the Academy of Sciences'
Institute of State and Law.175 Article 190-1, incidently, was
added to the code only in 1966 and so can be viewed as a feature
of the now out-of-favor Brezhnevism. Having allowed widespread
public suggestions for the repeal of Article 190-1, Soviet
leaders would suffer some international embarrassment if the
article were retained in the code. Two outcomes seem possible.
The first is repeal of Article 190-1, with retention of Article
70, but in somewhat modified form--perhaps with lesser penalties
or limited to ethnic agitation. The second is repeal of both
articles, with Soviet authorities relying on the wide variety of
other administrative and criminal law measures available to them
to control dissidence. The effectiveness of these measures is
shown by the apparent cessation or virtual cessation of the use
of Articles 70 and 190-1 under Gorbachev. The repeal of both
articles would of course produce great dividends in international
public opinion. However, it might further exacerbate the growing
problem of demands for rights by ethnic groups.
C. Homosexual Conduct
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Homosexual activity between consenting adults is a crime
under Soviet law.176 Influential criminal law scholars, such as
Sofia Kelina and Aleksandr Yakovlev have called for the
elimination of criminal liability for homosexual activity unless
force was used or minors were involved)-77 Yakovlev, however,
indicated that because of the AIDS scare in the Soviet Union,
this reform was unlikely to come about soon. Articles in the
Soviet press have specifically urged that homosexual conduct
continue to be banned because of AIDS.178
D. Jury System
The jury system was initiated in Russia in the nineteenth
century. It was severely restricted in the early twentieth
century after juries acquitted a number of persons accused of
politically motivated crimes. The jury system was abolished
after the revolution. In its place Lenin put a system, borrowed
from German commercial courts, of one judge and two "people's
assessors," all three of whom deliberated together. This system
has in fact resulted in control of the outcome of cases by the
judge, who is, as has been mentioned, very subject to local Party
influences. From time to time Soviet legal scholars have
suggested the reinstatement of a jury system. Sometimes this
call is thinly disguised as a suggestion that there should be
more people's assessors.179
E. Activating the Role of People's Assessors
President Terebilov of the USSR Supreme Court has not gone
so far as to argue for a jury system, but has stated strongly
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that people's assessors should have a more active role, rather
than merely rubber-stamping judges' decisions.18?
F. Judicial Robes
The proposal for a jury system is not the only example of
Anglophilia among Soviet criminal law professors. One has
suggested that the prestige of the courts be increased by having
the judges wear robes.
G. Acquittals
There has been an increasing recognition in the Soviet Union
that the imposition of quotas on police to solve crimes
(discussed above), upon procurators to get convictions, and on
trial and appellate courts has had a very negative effect on the
criminal justice system. Investigatory'authorities have refused
to accept complaints. Individuals have been "framed" and
confessions have been forced181 so that crimes can be solved.
Courts have refused to convict the innocent, condemning them to
extended reinvestigations. Appellate courts have feared to
reverse trial courts, lest the courts under their supervision
appear to be doing poorly.
In an article published in January 1985, Arkadii Vaksberg, a
well-known reporter for Literaturnaia gazeta, criticized a
prosecutor for sending a law-abiding citizen who had killed in
self-defense for psychiatric examination. There was no
indication, however, of any impropriety on the part of the
psychiatric institution.182
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In an excellent study, Professor Peter Solomon has
chronicled the virtual disappearance of acquittals from Soviet
criminal procedure.183 USSR Supreme Court Chairman Terebilov and
other officials have sharply criticized this disappearance of
acquittals.184 The USSR Supreme Court has issued a binding order
on the need to acquit the innocent.188 A recent Supreme Court
case reversed a lower court for failing to order an acquittal
when it should have, signaling that pressure may be beginning
from above to restore acquittals.186
Supreme Court President Terebilov has also called for more
effective efforts to restore the rights of those acquitted.160
H. Remove Investigators from Procurator's Office
The Soviet system of preliminary investigation of criminal
cases differs in a very significant way from that in Western
European countries. In the USSR, investigators in serious cases
are subordinate to the Procuracy; in Western Europe,
investigators are subordinate to the judicial branch of
government. Despite laws purporting to insulate the
investigatory and prosecutorial functions of the Procuracy, there
is an inherent conflict of interest, since an investigator's
career depends upon recommendations for promotion from officials
whose primary function is prosecution. Liberal commentators are
now suggesting that the investigatory apparatus be removed from
the Procuracy and be assigned to the judiciary, the Ministry of
Justice, or an independent organization.187
I. Defense Counsel Participation
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A long-standing demand of Soviet criminal law scholars has
been to give Soviet defense lawyers access to their clients
before the end of the preliminary investigation.188 It now
appears that this demand will finally be satisfied in the new
criminal procedure legislation being drafted.189
J. Improving the Status of the Bar
To date, the status of lawyers who defend criminals has
remained unchanged. Defense lawyers and their academic
supporters have taken advantage of "glasnost'" to make a number
of suggestions for improving their situation. These suggestions
are usually phrased in terms of improving the ability of lawyers
to provide an adequate defense to their clients. Perhaps not
entirely coincidently, the suggestions would improve the status,
pay, and security of defense attorneys.190 Suggestions include:
that practicing lawyers should get a fairer share of membership
on policy-making committees and of awards for outstanding
lawyers; that there should be a USSR association of defense
lawyers; that the official scale of charges for lawyers'
services be adjusted sharply upward. This last proposal is of
more than economic significance. The current ridiculously low
official fee scale has led to a widespread custom of under-the-
table "tipping" of lawyers, "MIKST" in Russian slang. Each
lawyer is faked with an unhappy choice: to live in poverty, or
to subject himself to blackmail and possible prosecution by
officials who know he is taking illegal payments. Most lawyers
choose the latter and thus lose their independence.
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K. Better Review
Supreme Court President Terebilov has said that reviewing
courts should call up and examine the full records of the cases
they are reviewing rather than making the cursory review that is
all too common at present.191
L. Death Penalty
The death penalty has a complex history in Soviet law. It
was abolished by Stalin in 1947 and reinstated for a few crimes
in the 1950s and for many more by Khrushchev in the early 1960s.
Recently there has been a debate over the death penalty in the
press. However, since much of this debate has taken place in the
Moscow News, which has extremely limited circulation within the
Soviet Union, it is unclear if this debate is meant for Soviet or
foreign consumption.192 Criminal law scholar Aleksandr Yakovlev
spoke out against the death penalty in an article in the mass
circulation magazine Ogonek. Citizens send a massive number of
pro-death-penalty letters to the editors in reaction to this
article.193 Death penalty opponents, speaking out in the Soviet
Union under glasnost', have doubted the deterrent effect of the
death penalty. Nevertheless it is being used. Why? There are a
number of possible explanations: (1) the Politburo may think it
does have a deterrent effect, if not on those who commit crimes
of passion, at least on those who commit complex embezzlement
schemes; (2) the threat of the death penalty may be useful to
the investigatory authorities in persuading economic criminals to
talk about the roles of their co-conspirators; (3) the public
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may be inspired to w9rk harder if given the impression that
thieving officials are being dealt with severely.
There has been discussion in the Soviet press and by Soviet
officials on what will happen to the death penalty during the
process of the revision of criminal legislation that is now under
way. In an interview with Radio Moscow, criminal law specialist
Aleksandr Yakovlev predicted that new criminal legislation would
abolish the death penalty for economic crimes)-94 Two high
Soviet officials, the USSR Minister of Justice, Boris Kravtsov,
and the RSFSR Minister of Justice, Aleksandr Sukharev, have
stated publicly that the death penalty will be abolished for some
crimes. However, neither indicated the crimes for which the
penalty would be abolished.195 The areas mentioned by the most
authoritative Soviet spokesmen involve the abolition of the
application of the death penalty to women and to persons over
sixty. No authoritative Soviet official appears to have publicly
mentioned abolition of the death penalty for economic crimes.
Indeed, as mentioned above, the death penalty is still being
applied very actively for such crimes.
14. Publication of Statistics
Statistics on crime and punishment were freely published in
the Soviet Union until the early 1930s, when their publication
was stopped under Stalin. In 1986 and 1987, Sovie sociologists
and legal scholars wrote a number of articles were published by
leading legal journals calling for the systematic publication of
crime statistics.'" In April 1987, the Politburo authorized
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fuller publication of legal statistics.197 Legal scholars, the
Ministry of Justice, and the Moscow police are releasing more
statistics. However, there still has been no publication, and no
announcement of plans to publish comprehensive statistics of
crime and punishment.
XI. Increased Investment in the Criminal Justice System?
A. Introduction
Liberal legal scholars and various groups within the legal
profession are asking for a number of changes in the legal system
that differ from the changes just discussed in that they would
require involve increased investment. This is not a battle of
legal liberals versus legal conservatives. No one in the legal
profession objects to increased government spending on the legal
system. Even outside the profession, no one is suggesting that
the changes proposed would be a bad idea. But given the state of
the Soviet economy, it is not surprising that governmental
authorities have not moved quickly to provide the requested
funds.
B. Ending Correspondence Legal Education
A substantial percentage of law students in the Soviet Union
are enrolled in correspondence ("zaochnyi") legal education.
They do assignments by mail and have only occasional intensive
training sessions at the institution in which they are enrolled.
As far as correspondence courses go, Soviet correspondence legal
education is fairly well organized, with capable instructors and'
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good quality materials. However, the quality of the training
falls far short of that available in the day or evening divisions
of law faculties and legal institutes. A leading Soviet legal
scholar has called for the elimination of correspondence legal
education and the expansion of regular legal education as a
necessary step toward creating a better prepared legal
profession.198 This change would probably lead to better trained
lawyers, but would be extremely expensive to implement.
C. More Elegant Courthouses
Most Soviet courthouses are shabby. Soviet legal
commentators point out that this shabbiness deprives courts of
the necessary dignity and authority. They have called for the
refurbishing of old courthouses and the construction of new
courthouses. This call has met with some success--work is
progressing on a hew "Palace of Justice" in Moscow.
D. Orienting Labor Camps Toward Reform Rather Than Plan
Fulfillment
The Soviet press has published a number of articles decrying
the fact that the emphasis in labor camps appears to be more on
the fulfillment of economic production plans than on
rehabilitation. The articles have particularly criticized the
situation in juvenile camps.199 However, turning the camps from
places of production and punishment into places of education
would be an extremely expensive undertaking with no guarantee of
results.
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XII. THE FUTURE
A great deal has happened in the Soviet criminal law system
under Gorbachev. Many of the changes, however, involve
continuation of policies developed in the past and thus cannot be
specifically attributed to the current regime. The most
important policies that can be directly attributed to his
influence include the strengthening of central law enforcement
agencies at the expense of local political authorities, the
reduction in the use of criminal law against dissidents, a much
greater publicity of facts and statistics about crime in the
USSR, and a freer debate about the future of Soviet criminal law.
So far, none of the changes undertaken has directly required any
significant investment of money. One change, however, is a part
of policies that could prove very expensive. The significant
reduction in the use of criminal sanctions against dissident
speech and demonstrations is an element of larger policies of
"glasnost'" and "demokratizatsia" that have worked well in the
Russian heartland, and have played well to the foreign press, but
that have unshackled immense grievances of the non-Russian
peoples of the Soviet Union.
The promised new Criminal Code and new criminal procedure
and corrections legislation may be expected to appear in due
course. At least cosmetic and perhaps real reductions will be
made in the use of the death sentence. Improvements will be made
in the image of Soviet criminal law with new courthouses and
increased rights for defense counsel. Experiments will continue
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NOTES
1G. Ovcharenko and A. Cherniak, "Avtoritet suda," Pravda,
May 13, 1987, pp. 3, 6.
2"Iuridicheskie dialogi. Mera otvetstvennosti," Izvestia,
March 14, 1986, p. 3.
3I. Usmankhozhdaev, "'Pravda' vystupila. Chto sdelano?
'Chestnoe imia'," Pravda, July 25, 1986, p. 3; Sovetskaia
Belorussia, June 10, 1986, P. 4, translated as "Resolution of the
Belorussian Republic Supreme Soviet," CDS.P, Vol. 38, No. 24
(1986), p. 23 (two judges removed for unjust convictions).
Leonid Zhukhovitskii, " Pisatel'i obshchestvo. Ostorozhno--
pripiska!," Lit. aaz., June 11, 1986, p. 13 (Evpatoria judge,
investigator force youths to confess to thefts in effort to
improve city's poor crime-fighting statistics.).
4I. Tivodar, "A v sud'i--kto?," Pravda, June 10, 1987, p. 3.
50b uvelichenii shtatnoi chislennosti apparata Verkhovnogo
suda SSSR. Ved. SSSR, 1985, no. 32, item 585.
6Ved. SSSR, 1978, No. 2, item 24.
7Ved. SSSR, 1981, No. 7, item 155.
I
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8Ved. SSSR, 1981, No. 48, item 1259.
9Ved. SSSR, 1984, No. 28, item 486.
10Arkadii Vaksberg, "Sud'ba prokurora," Lit. caz., Oct. 26,
1987, p. 13.
11Po otchetu General'nogo prokurora SSSR o deiatel'nosti
prokuratury SSSR po nadzoru za ispolneniem trebovanii sovetskikh
zakonov ob ukreplenii pravoporiadka, okhrane pray i zakonnykh
interesov grEzhdan. Ved. SSSR, 1985, no. 27, item 480.
12A. Rekunkov, "Puti i perspektivy perestroiki v organakh
prokuratury," Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost', 1987, No. 2, pp.
7-14.
13I.. Usmankhozhdaev, "'Pravda' vystupila. Chto sdelano?
'Chestnoe imia'," Pravda, July 25, 1986, p. 3; A. Gorbinov and
A. Vlasov, "Posle vystupleniia 'Izvestii.' Nakazany za volokitu
i popustitel'stvo. Sluchai na 22-m kilometr--No. 156," Izvestia,
July 23, 1986, p. 3; "Posle vystupleniia 'Izvestii.' Stol'
dolgoe ozhidanie," Izvestia, Aug. 5, 1987, p. 2.
14Postanovlenie Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR o khode
vypolneniia Postanovleniia Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR "Po otchetu
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Gereral'nogo prokurora SSSR o deiatel'nosti prokuratury SSSR po
nadzoru za ispolneniem trebovanii sovetskikh zakonov ob
ukreplenii pravoporiadka, okhrane pray i zakonnykh interesov
grazhdan." Ved. SSSR, 1987, no. 13, item 167:
Procurators lack the necessary principledness in the
struggle with phenomena of localism, departmentalism, with
bureaucratism and abuses by officials causing harm to the
interests of society and the rights of citizens. There
still are intolerable cases of ignoring the requirements of
law in the initiation of criminal cases, the arrest and
detention of citizens, of baseless bringing of individual
persons to responsibility..
150b izmenenii v strukture Prokuratury Soiuza SSR. Ved.
SSSR, 1986, no. 13, item 217.
16G. Alimov, "Brifing v MVD SSSR," Izvestia, May 27, 1987,
p. 6.
17Sovetskaia Kirgizia, July 7, 1987. According to Radio
Liberty, this issue reported that the Kazahstan Republic Minister
of Internal Affairs in Kazakhstan, Dzhusupbek Akmatov, had been
replaced by a high-ranking senior criminal investigator, Viktor
Goncharov. The newspaper said Akmatov had been replaced because
of "serious inadequacies in his work." A typical isolated report
of a crackdown was a story about the firing of police officers ,
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and investigators in the Udmurt Atonomous Republic. "V komitete
Partiinogo Kontrolia pri Ts K KPSS," Pravda, Dec. 8, 1987, p. 3.
Another typical story told how a court sentenced the former chief
of the Volgograd Oblast police, General Ivanov, to ten years in
prison for taking bribes as part of a scheme to cover up thefts
from industrial enterprises. The court also imposed severe
sentences on others involved. Krasnaia zvezda, quoted in Radio
Liberty, The USSR This Week, Dec. 11,,1987, at Dec. 5.
18Konstantin Simis, USSR: The Corrupt Society (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. 180-204.
19Ibid., pp. 96-125.
20Kazakbstanskaia oravda quoted in a Reuters dispatch
summarized in Radio Liberty, The USSR This Week, July 24, 1987,
at July 21.
21?Iz zala suda. Voru vora," Pravda, Aug. 21, 1987, p. 8.
22fl 0 rabote Sovetov narodnykh deputatov Kaluzhskoi oblasti
po obespecheniiu okhrany obshestvennogo poriadka i bor'be s
pravonarusheniiami," Ved. SSSR, 1986, No. 52, item 1047;
Pravda, Dec. 30, 1986, p. 2.
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23Kazakhstanskaia pravda, quoted in Reuters dispatch
summarized in Radio Liberty, The USSR This Week, July 24, 1987,
at July 21; G. Alimov, "Brifing v MVD SSSR," Izvestia, May 27,
1987, p. 6.
24fl Glasno o glasnosti. Kuda smotrit militsiia. Beseda s
ministrom vnutrennykh del Belorusskoi SSSR V. A. Piskarevym,"
Izvestia, April 16, 1985, p. 3.
Likhanov, "Bronnirovannye mundiry," Oconek, 1987,
No. 7, pp. 30-31.
260.S. Ioffe and P.B. Maggs, Soviet Law in Theory and
Practice (New York: Oceana, 1983), p. 244.
27Sotsialisticheskaia industriia, Feb. 1, 1987, concluding a
two part series, summarized in Radio Liberty, The Soviet Union
This Week, Feb. 6, 1987, at Feb. 1. Many further details were
provided in "Zakrytaia tema," Komsomol'skaia pravda, Nov. 11,
1987, p. 4.
2
BRadio Liberty, The Soviet Union This Week, Aug. 21, 1987,
at Aug. 18.
29A. Illesh, "Militsia i glasnost'," Izvestia, Dec. 28,
1987, p. 4.
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100
3011V komitete Partiinogo Kontrolia pri TsK KPSS, Pravda,
Jan. 20, 1988, p. 2, col. 1.
31uVozvrashchaias' k napechatannomu.
Izvestia, June 13, 1986, P. 6.
'Posle anonimki',"
32V. Loginov, "Pri svete pravdy. S Plenuma Ts K Kompartii
Turkmenistana," Pravda, Oct. 24, 1986, p. 2.
33E. Kondratov, "Glasno o glasnosti. Tak gde zhe byl
prokuror," Izvestia, Dec. 2, 1986, p. 3.
34For general background, see Peter H. Solomon, Jr., "Soviet
Politicians and Criminal Prosecutions: The Logic of Party
Intervention," Soviet Interview Project, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, Working Paper #33 (1987). Also see Louise
Shelley, "The Political Functions of Soviet Courts: A Model for
One Party States," Review of Socialist Law, 13 (1987), 263.
35Kazakhstanskaia pravda, quoted in an October 13, 1987,
Reuters dispatch, reported in Radio Liberty USSR This Week, Oct.
16, 1987, at Oct. 13.
36V.I. Terebilov, "XXVII Sflezd KPSS i zadachi po
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sovershenstovaniiu sudebnoi deiatel'nosti," BVS SSSR, 1986, No.
3, p. 4.
37A. Rekunkov, "Puti i perspektivy perestroiki v organakh
prokuratury," Sots. zak., 1987, No. 2, pp. 7-14, at p. 9.
38Postanovlenie Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR o khode
vypolneniia Postanovleniia Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR "Po otchetu
Gereral'nogo prokurora SSSR o deiatel'nosti prokuratury SSSR po
nadzoru za ispolneniem trebovanii sovetskikh zakonov ob
ukreplenii pravoporiadka, okhrane pray i zakonnykh interesov
grazhdan." Ved. SSSR, 1987, no. 13, item 167.
39Po otchetu GeneraI'nogo prokurora SSSR o deiatel'nosti
prokuratury SSSR pa nadzoru za ispolneniem trebovanii sovetskikh
zakonov ob ukreplenii pravoporiadka, okhrane pray i zakonnykh
interesov grazhdan. Ved. SSSR, 1985, no. 27, item 480.
40"v Tseritrallnom Komitete KPSS. 0 merakh pa povysheniiu
roli prokurorskogo nadzora i ukreplenii sotsialisticheskoi
zakonnosti i pravoporiadka," Pravda, June 19, 1987, p. 1.
41?V Tsentral'nom Komitete KPSS. 0 dal'neishem ukreplenii
sotsialisticheskoi zakonnosti i pravoporiadka, usilenii okhrany
pray i zakonnykh interesov grazhdan," Pravda, Nov. 30, 1986, pp.
1-2.
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102
42"V Politbiuro TsK KPSS," Pravda, Oct. 3, 1986, P. 1;
Izvestia, Oct. 4, 1986, p. 1.
43See George Ginsburgs, "The Soviet Judicial Elite: Is
it?," Review of Socialist Law, 11 (1985), 293.
44"Iuridicheskie dialogi. Pravo i demokratiia," Izvestia,
Oct. 4, 1986, P. 3. (Iu. Feofanov interviews Academician
Vladimir Kudriavtsev, Director of the Institute of State and Law
of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.)
45V. M. Savitskii, "Pravosudie i perestroika," Sovetskoe
aosudarstvo i ptavo, 1987, No. 9, p. 29 at p. 30.
4611V sudebnykh kollegiiakh Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR," VVS SSSR,
1987, No. 1, p. 43.
47"'Moral' i pravo. V pol'zu spravedlivosti," Lit..gaz.,
Sept. 24, 1986 p. 13. Interview with criminal law scholar
Alekandr Maksimovich Iakovlev of the Institute of State and Law.
48flZakon est' zakon, Pravda, March 25, 1987; The
Procurator General stated:
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The procuracy and other law enforcement agencies have
conducted considerable work in recent years in the struggle
against report-padding, bribery, and other abuses. Their
attention has been concentrated primarily on the exposure of
the organizers of these crimes and on a deeper study of the
mechanisms by which they have been committed. There should
be no repetition anywhere of a situation like that which
developed in the recent past in Uzbekistan. As the former
Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Uzbekistan,
Khudaiberdyev, openly recognized, as the result of the
faulty style of work of the republic's leadership, an
atmosphere gradually developed of general deception and
report-padding.
Bribery that paralyzed the Trade Administrations of
Moscow and Rostov flourished on the same faulty basis of
lack of oversight and lack of responsibility.
49Iurii Lutin, "Zhizn' za 'kirpichom'," Ogonek, 1987, No.
16, p. 6.
50Kazakhstanskaia oravda quoted in Reuters, as summarized in
Radio Liberty, The USSR This Week, Oct. 16, 1987, at Oct. 11.
51Pravda vostoka, Nov. 22, 1985, pp. 2-3, translated as
"Conform to the Times.--How the Decisions of the 16th Plenary
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Session of the Uzbekistan Communist Party Central Committee Are
Being Implemented," CDSP, Vol. 37, No. 51 (1986)., p. 5.
52"V Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 6, P. 28; "B Verkhovnom sude SSSR,"
Pravda, Aug. 28, 1986, p. 6; E. Zhbanov, "Sudebnyi ocherk. Delo
o khlopke," Izvestia, Sept. 5, 1986, p. 6 and (Part II) Sept. 6,
p. 3.
53"V Verkhovnom Sude SSSR," Izvestia, June 4, p. 6.
54"v Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolvovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 4, p. 22. According to the obverse of
the title page, 167,250 copies of this issue were printed, which
would be enough for an extremely high percentage of the legal
profession to receive personal copies.
55Zaria vostoka, June 2, 1985, pp. 1-2; Zaria vostoka, Dec.
5, 1985, p. 1; V Prokurature SSSR. Po normam berezhlivosti,"
,Pravda, May 12, 1986, p. 3.
56" S chernogo khoda," Izvestia, July, 16, 1984, P.
6; G.
Filimonov, "Shal'nye den'gi. Zametki iurista," Pravda, Nov. 30,
1985, p. 3; A. Illesh, "Razmyshleniia posle suda. V kontse
chernogo khoda," Izvestia, Feb. 6, 1986, p. 6.
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57Iurii Feofanov, "Kto u telefona: razmyshleniia v sudebnom
zale," Izvestia, Jan. 16, 1988, P. 3.
'56Arkadii Vaksberg, "Moral' i pravo. Sud'ba prokurora," Lit
Oct. 26, 1987, p. 13.
59V. Kassis and L. Kolosov, "Iz zala sudy.
Izvestia, Aug. 2, 1984, p. 6.
Razplata,"
60Moskovskaia pravda, Sept. 29, 1985, p. 3; "Iuridicheskie
dialogi. Vokrug prilavki," Izvestia, May 30, 1986, p. 3.
61"V Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 5, p. 21.
62Businessman's Moscow (Delovaia Moskva), '84 (Moscow: V/0
Vneshtorgreklama, 1984), p. 145.
63?V Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 4, P. 22; see also TASS quoted in
Radio Liberty, The USSR This Week, June 19, 1987, at June 15.
64Krasnaia zvezda, around April 3, 1987.
65,1V Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1985, No. 5, p. 23.
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106
66"V sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 1, p. 37.
6711V Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 3, p. 41.
68ftV Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 4, p. 18.
69"V Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 1, p. 39.
70Reuters and UPI, Feb. 3, 1987, quoted in Radio Liberty,
The USSR This Week, Feb. 6, 1987.
71?
Ironicheskii detektiv.
Pazplata za rotozeistvo,"
Izvestia, May 29, 1987, p. 6.
72Selskaia zhizn', March 24, 1985, p. 4.
73?Iuridicheskie dialogi. Ot vygovora v prikaze do stat'i
UK," Izvestia, May 29, 1986, p. 3.
74V. Itkin, "Uroki sudebnogo dela.
Izvestia, June 3, 1985,p. 6.
Ekzamen vziatkoi,"
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75Sovetskaia Rossiia, March 22, 1985, P. 2.
76Iu. Feofanov, "Sudebnyi ocherk. Katastrofa v 'mednykh
trubakh'," Izvestia, Oct. 9, 1985, p. 6.
77 Sotsialisticheskaia industriia, summarized in Radio
Liberty, The USSR This Week, June 26, 1987, at June 20.
78A. Vorotnikov, "Iz zala suda: Za proekt--vziatku,"
Pravda, Dec. 8, 1987, Vol. 39, No. 49 (1988), p. 18.
79E. Kondratov, "Glasno o glasnosti. Tak gde zhe byl
prokuror," Izvestia, Dec. 2, 1986, p. 3; M. Odinets and M.
Poltoranin, "Vozvrashchaias k napechatannomu. Za poslednei
chertoi," Pravda, Jan. 4, 1987, p. 3; V. Chebrikov, "Posle
vystuplehiia 'Pravdy.' Za poslednei chertoi," Pravda, Jan. 8,
1987, p. 1; A. Vlasov, "'Pravda' bystupila, shto sdelano. 'Za
poslednoi chertoi," Pravda, January 30, 1987, p. 2; Pravda
Ukrainy, quoted by Reuters, summarized in Radio Liberty, The USSR
This Week, May 29, 1987, at May 28 (The head of the KGB in the
Ukraine, Stepan Mukha, retired following a scandal over the false
arrest of a journalist in the Ukrainian city of Voroshilovgrad.
Mukha was been replaced by Nikolai Golushko.); Radio Moscow-1,
19:30, July 16, 1987, as reported in Radio Liberty, The USSR This
Week, July 17, 1987, at July 16. ("The Central Committee of the.
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Ukrainian Communist Party removed former Prime Minister Aleksandr
Lyashko and former Ukrainian KGB chief Stepan Mukha from the
Ukrainian Party Central Committee Poliburo. Lyashko, who was a
full member of the Politburo, retired as prime minister on July
10 at the age of seventy-one. Mukha, who was a candidate member,
was replaced as KGB chief in the Ukraine earlier this year
following the disclosure of KGB involvement in the wrongful
arrest of a Soviet journalist.") B. Plekhanov, Meditsinskaia
oazeta, Oct. 16, 1987, p. 2, translated as "Looking Truth in the
Eye: REPRISAL.--A Story of How a Doctor Was Pressed to Commit
Perjury," CDSP, Vo. 39, No. 43, p. 23 (Investigative reporter
Berkhin dies. Story of attempt to "frame" the Krenins for
pornography to make them incriminate Berkhin.).
80Amy Knight, "The Soviet Security Police on the Eve of Its
Seventieth Anniversary," Radio Liberty Report 484/87, December
8, 1987.
81Nicholas Lampert, Whistleblowing in the Soviet Union:
Complaints and Abuses Under State Socialism (London: Macmillan,
1985).
82Peter H. Solomon, Jr., "Soviet Politicians and Criminal
Prosecutions: The Logic of Party Intervention," Soviet
Interview Project, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Working Paper #33 (1987).
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-4)
109
83Postanovlenie No. 9 Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 18
aprelia 1986 "0 premenenii sudami zakonodatel'stva ob
otvetstvennosti dolzhnostnykh lits za narushenie poriadka
rassmotrentia predlozhenii, zaiavlenii, zhalob grazhdan i
presledovanie za kritiku," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 3, p. 25.
84L. Grafova, "Chto zhdet paskviianta-inkognito i
zazhishchika kritiki," Lit. gaz., Jan. 1, 1986, p. 11.
85Sovetskaia Moldavia as quoted by Reuters, May 28, 1987,
summarized in Radio Liberty The USSR This Week, June 5, 1987, at
May 30. M. Volkov, "Nepreklonnaia Khalima: Proisshestvie v
Chardzhou kotoroe vzvolnovalo gorod," Pravda, Dec. 28, 1987, p. 4
(Crime and corruption fighting Party official murdered. Province-
Party secretary resigns for "health" reasons.).
86V. Prokushev, "Partiinaia zhizn': chto za konfliktom
'Presleovanie prekratit' . . .," Pravda, May 6, 1987, p. 2.
87Radio Moscow-1 (19:00) reported in Radio Liberty, The USSR
This Week, June 12, 1987, at June 10. (Party officials in the
autonomous republic of Bashkiria asked the CPSU Central Committee
to oust Midhat Shakirov as their first secretary. The Party
Committee decided it was impossible for Shakirov to keep his job
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after they discussed an article about Bashkiria which appeared in
Pravda on May 6.).
88Radio Moscow-2 (21:00), reported in Radio Liberty, The
USSR This Week, June 26, 1987, at June 23.
89Decree of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the
Azerbaidzhanian SSR of July 30, 1985, BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 4, p.
30.
90V. Prokushev, "Partiinaia zhizn': chto za konfliktom
'Presleovanie prekratit' . . .," Pravda, May 6, 1987, p. 2.
91E. Maksimova i I. Martkovich, "Bez zashchiti," Izvestia,
July 11, 1987, p. 1.
92A. Novikov, S. Razin, and M. Mishin, "2akrytaia tema,"
Komsomol'skaia pravda, Nov. 11, 1987, p. 4.
18.
9 8Radio Liberty, The USSR This Week, Aug. 21, 1987, at Aug.
94New York Times, March 21, 1988, p.
95
"Primenenie sudami zakonodatel'stva, napravlennogo na
bor'bu s p'ianstvom i alkogolizmom," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 4, p.
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35; Postanovlenie No. 15 Plenum Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 1
noiabria 1985 g., "0 praktike primeneniia sudami
zakonodatel'stva, napravlennogo na usilenie bor'by s p'ianstvom
in alkogolizmom, BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 1, p. 3; S.I. Gusev, "0
praktike primeneniia sudami zakonodatel'stva, napravlennogo na
usilenie bor'by $ p'iantstvom i alkogoizmom," BVS SSSR, 1986, No.
1, p. 27.
96.Ostanovit' samogonshchika. Interv'iu s ministrom
vnutrennykh del SSSR A.V. Vlasovym, Izvestia, March 11, 1987, p.
3.
97V. Pavlenko, "Vsem mirom protiv p'ianstva," Trud, July
19, 1987, p. 4; "Reid 'Izvestii' Put' k trezvoi zhizni,"
Izvestia, May 12, 1987, p. 3; "Obshchimi usiliiami: mozhno i
nuzhno vesti bor'bu za trezvoi obraz zhizni," Izvestia, Dec. 10,
1985, p. 3.
98.Ostanovit' samogonshchika. Interv'iu s ministrom
vnutrennykh del SSSR A.V. Vlasovym, Izvestia, March 11, 1987, p.
3.
99V. M. Savitskii, "Pravosudie i perestroika," Sovetskoe
oosudarstvo i pravo, 1987, No. 9, p, 29 at p. 30.
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100"Ob otveststvennosti za samogonovarenie," Ved. SSSR,
1987, no. 22, item 313; "0 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v
nekotorye zakonodatel'nye akty RSFSR," Ved. RSFSR, 1987, no. 24,
item 839; 0 poriadke primeneniia stat'i 1 Ukaza Prezidiuma
Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR "Ob otvetstvennosti za samogonovarenie,"
Ved. SSSR, 1987, No. 25, item 350.
101Edict of May 28, 1986, 0 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii
v nekotorye zakonodatel'nye akty RSFSR, Ved. RSFSR, 1986, No. 23,
item 638.
102Iu. Sergeev, in MeditSinskaia clazeta, April 9, 1986, p.
3, translated as "Legal Knowledge: Narcotics.--Liability for
Illegal Use and Theft," CDSP, Vol. 38, No. 14 (1986), p. 28.
103u Kovarnye grammy durmana. Na voprosy chitatelei
otvechaet ministr vnutrennykh del SSSR," Pravda, Jan. 6, 1987, p.
3.
104u Opasnoe pristrastie. Narkotiki i narkomany: tri
aspekta problemy," Lit. gaz., Aug. 20, 1987, p. 11.
105G. Alimov, "Poslednie plantagtsii. Priniato reshenie o
polnom prekrashchenii posevov maslichnogo maka v strane,"
Izvestia, Oct. 6, 1987, p. 2; 0 zapreshchenii poseva i
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vyrashchivaniia grazhdanami maslichnogo maka, SP SSSR, 1987, No.
40, item 128.
106A. Illesh, "Iz kompetentnvkh istochnikov: Kak militsiia
boretsia s narkomaniei," Izvestia, May 13, 1987, p. 6; A. Illesh
and E. Shestinskii, "Iz kompetentykh istochnikov: Eshche raz o
narkomanii," Izvestia, Nov. 23, 1987, p. 4.
107V. Shcherban', "Reportazh s pristrasiem:
Izvestia, June 27, 1986, P. 6.
durman,"
108L. Kislinskaia, "'Legkoe povedene' na vesakh
pravosudiia," Sovetskaia Rossiia, March 12, 1987, p. 4; G.
Kurov, "Uspoved"Nochnoi babochki," Sovetskaia Rossiia, March
19, 1987, p. 4; G. Nerobeyeva, Sovetskaia Belorussia, Dec. 6,
1987, p. 2, translated as "On the Subject of Morality: We
Shouldn't Avert Our Eyes," CDSP, Vol. 39, No. 50 (1988), p. 27
(prostitution in student dormitories).
109"0 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v zakonodatel'stvo
RSFSR ob otvetstvennosti za administrativnye pravonarusheniia,"
Ved. RSFSR, 1987, No. 23, item 800.
110, 'V Politbiuro TsK KPSS," Pravda, August 14, 1987, p. 1.
s
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111ft0 merakh profilaktiki zarazheniia virusom SPID," Ved.
SSSR, 1987, No. 34, item 560.
112"0 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v Osnovy
ispravitel'no-trudovogo zakonodatel'stva Soiuza SSR i soiuznykh
respublik," Ved. SSSR, 1987, No. 41, item 679; "0 vnesenii
izmenenii i dopolnenii v Ugolovnoi, Ugolovno-protsessualinyi i
Ispravitel'no-trodovoi kodeksy RSFSR," Ved. RSFSR, 1987, No. 43,
item 1501.
113V. Pilipenko, "Osobyi sluchai: Videofirmach,"
Komsomol'skaia oravda, Sept. 20, 1985, p. 4; N. Kishchik and E.
Bostrukhov, "Videouroki," Izvestia, Oct. 15, 1985, p. 3.
114m0 vnesenii dopolnenii v Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR," Ved.
RSFSR, 1986, No. 32, item 904.
115 "Tamozhnia," Pravda, Aug. 24, 1987, p. 4.
116Postanovlenie No. 7 Plenum Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR, "0
praktike primeneniia sudami zakonodatel'stva po delam o
pripiskakh i drugikh iskazheniiakh otchetnosti o vypolnenii
planov," BVS SSSR, 1985, No. 4, p. 10.
117fl
Primenenie sudami zakonodatel'stvo ob otvetstvennosti za
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pripiski i drugie iskazheniia otchetnosti o vypolnenii planov
(Obzor sudebnoi praktiki), BVS SSR, 1985, No. 6, P. 35.
118Postanovlenie No. 1 Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 5
aprelia 1985 g. 0 praktike primeneniia sudami zakonodatel'stva ob
otvetstvennosti za vypusk iz promyshlennykh predpriiatii
nedobrokachestvennoi, nestandartnoi iii nekomplektnoi produktsii
i za vypusk v prodazhu takikh tovarov v torgovykh
predpriiatiiakh, BVS SSSR, 1985, No. 3, p. 13.
119S.I. Gusev, "0 praktike primeneniia sudami
zakonodatel'stva ob otvetstvennosti za vypusk iz promyshlennykh
predpriiatii nedobrokachestvennoi, nestandartnoi
nekomplektnoi produktsii, a takzh'e za bypusk v proda2hu takikh
tovarov v torgovykh predpriiatiiakh, BVS SSSR, 1985, No. 3, p.
33.
120I. Kruglianskaia, "Doroga," Izvestia, April 18, 1985, p.
3; "Posle kritiki. Kogda oslablen kontrol'," Pravda, April 16,
1986, P. 3; I. Kruglianskaia, "Vozvrashchaias' k napechatannomu.
Proverki na dorogakh," Izvestia, May 31, 1987, p. 3.
121fl0 chestnom i nechestnom ruble beseduem s General'nym
prokurorom SSSR A. Rekunkovym korrespondent 'Izvestii',"
Izvestia, June 2, 1986, p. 3.
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122?V sudebnykh kollegiiakh Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR," BVS
SSSR, 1987, No. 1, P. 43.
123Case of 0.P. Ovchinikova and A.S. Novichikhina, BVS SSSR,
1987, No. 2, p. 22.
1240b utverzhdenii Tipovogo polozheniia o brigadnom
khozraschete i brigadnom podriade, Tipovogo polozheniia o
kollektivnom podriade na proizvodstvennykh uchastkakh
ob"edinenii, predpriiatii i organizatsii, Biulleten' Goskomtruda,
1987, no. 3, p. 51.
125?Vinovat ii ogurets? 0 problemakh bor'by s netrudovymi
dokhodami na kolkhznykh rynkah," Pravda, July 14, 1986, p. 3.
126Postanovlenie No. 12 Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 21
iiunia 1985 g. 0 "0 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v
postanovlenie Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 13 dekabria 1974
g. No. 11 "0 sudebnoi praktike po delam o spekuliatsii," BVS
SSSR, 1985, No. 4, p. 27.
127?Ob usilenii bor'by s izvlecheniem netrudovykh dokhodov,"
Ved. SSSR, 1986, No. 22, item 364.
128Zakon ob individual'noi trudovoi deiatel'nosti, Ved.
SSSR, 1986, No. 47, item 964.
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129"Morskaia katastrofa: uroki i vyvody. Zavershilsia
sudebnyi protsess v Odesse," Pravda, March 31, 1987, P. 6; V
Sudebnoi kollegii pa ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR, BVS
SSSR, 1987, No. 3, p. 38 (Black Sea collission); V Sudebnoi
kollegii pa ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR, BVS SSSR,
1987, No. 5, p. 20 (Chernobyl).
1300 vnesenii izmenenii v stat'iu 29 Osnov ugolovnogo
zakonodatel'stva Soiuza SSR i soiuznykh respublik. Ved. SSSR,
1985, no. 41, item 780.
1310b ugolovnoi otvetstvennosti za zakhvat zalozhnikov, Ved.
SSSR, 1987, no. 28, item 437; 0 vnesenii izmenii i dopolnenii v
Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR, Ved. RSFSR, 1987, No. 30, item 1087.
132V. Krotov, "Obvinenenie prediavleno,"
1986, p. 6.
Izvestia, Sept. 9,
133flInterv'iu 'Izvestii': Posle deportatsii," Izvestia,
June 7, 1987 (Linnas). Izvestia, June 12, 1986, p. 4
(Federenko); Izvestia, June 21, 1986 (Federenko executed).
134G. Kotoian, Kommunist (Erevan), Nov. 20, 1985, p. 4,
translated as "Harboring a Grudge," CDSP, Vol. 38, No. 5 (1986),
p. 23.
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135E. Matskevich, "Surovoe nakazanie podstrekateliam i
khuliganam," Izvestia, June 23, 1987, p. 6.
136u
Primenenie sudami zakonodatel'stva i rukovodiashikh
ras"iasnenii plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR pri rassmotrenii del o
prestupleniiakh nesovershennoletnikh (Obzor sudebenoi praktiki),"
BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 3, p. 43; Postanovlenie No. 17 Plenuma
Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 5 dekabria 1986 g., "0 vypolnenii sudami
rukovodiashchikh raz"iasnenii Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR po
primeneniiu zakonodatel'stva pri rassmotrenii del o
prestupleniiakh nesovershennoletnikh, BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 1, p.
18.
1370b amnistii v sviazi s 40-letiem Pobedy sovetskogo naroda
v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941-1945 godov. Ved. SSSR, 1985,
no. 18, item 309.
138?Ob amnistii v sviazi s 70-letiem Velikoi Oktiabr'skoi
sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii," Ved. SSSR, 1987, No. 25, item
351.
139"Gumannyi akt,"Izvestia, Feb. 14, 1987,
2.
140Yury Feofanov, "That's How We Started" The Development
of the Law," Izvestia, Aug. 11, 1987, pp. 1, 3; CDSP, Vol. 39,.
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No. 32 (1987), p. 7 (Legal affairs correspondent traces history
of Soviet legal justice through early post-revolutionary decrees,
formation of Cheka, Stalin-era abuses; he says fight for rule of
law goes on today). Alexander Yikovlev, "Justice and US:
Lessons of the 30s," Moscow News, 1988, No. 7, p. 15
(Rehabilitation of the members of the "anti-Soviet right-wing
Trotskyite bloc."); Lev Voskresensky, "Posthumous Justice: A
group of scientists is exonerated," Moscow News, 1987, No. 33,
12 (Supreme Court rules that Chayanov and others who opposed
Stalin on collectivization and who supported on family farms
committed no crimes.).
-1411uri Feofanov, "The Daughters of Arbat," Moscow News,
1988, No. 1, p. 13 (Full rehabilitation of ordinary citizens
caught up in the purges, who had been trying since 1957 to get
full rehabilitation.).
142ftBremia milovat'" (Aleksandr Maksimovich Iakovlev
interviewd by Alla Alova), Ogonek, 1987, No. 33, pp. 28-31; A.
Alikperov, "Pravovaia sistema--puti perestroiki: Kto pridet s
povinnoi," Pravda, Sept. 2, 1987.
1430 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v Osnovy uglovnogo
zakonodatel'stva Soiuza SSR i Soiuznykh respublik i Osnovy
ispravitel'no-trodovogo zakonodatel'stva Soiuza SSR i soiuznykh
respublik. Ved. SSSR, 1985, no. 15, item 252; 0 poriadke
P?
I
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primeneniia Ukaza Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 2 aprelia
1985 goda "0 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v Osnovy ugolovnogo
zakonodatel'stva Soiuza SSR i soiuznykh respublik i Osnovy
ispravitel'no-trudovogo.zakonodatel'stva Soiuza SSR i soiuznykh
respublik. Ved. $SSR, 1985, no. 39, item 715.
144Iu. M. Tkachevskii, "Izmeneniia v Osnovakh ugolovnogo i
ispravitel'no-trudovogo zakonodatelistva," Vestnik Moskovskoao
Universiteta, Seriia 11, Pravo, 1986, No. 2, p. 22.
145Ger P. van den Berg, "Judicial Statistics in a Period of
Glasnost'," Review of Socialist Law, 13 (1987), 299.
146Postanovlenie No. 11 Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 21
iiunia 1985 g., "0 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v
postanovlenie Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 19 oktiabria 1971
g. No. 9 "0 sudebnoi praktike uslovno-dosrochnogo osvobozhdeniia
osuzhdennykh ot nakazaniia i zameny neotbytoi chasti nakazaniia
bolee miagkim," BVS SSSR, 1985, No. 4, P. 27; Postanovlenie No.
8 Plenum Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 21 iunia 1985 g., "0 sudebnoi
praktike po primeneniiu otsrochki ispolneniia prigovora," BVS
SSSR, 1985, No. 4, p. 14; "Primenenie sudami otsrochki
ispolneniia prigovora (Obzor sudebnoi praktiki)," BVS SSSR, 1986,
No. 2, p. 42.
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1470 vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v Osnovy ispravitel'no-
trudovogo zakonodatel'stva Soiuza SSR i soiuznykh respublik, Ved.
SSSR, 1987, No. 41, item 679.
1488ovetskaia Rossiia, Aug. 14, 1987, p. 6.
149Natalya Buldyk, "Mercy," Moscow News, 1988, No. 5, p. 13.
150Lit. caz., April 15, 1987. The Supreme Court has
indicated that hardened criminals should be subject to severe
discipline, even though lesser offenders may be treated More
leniently, Postanovlenie No. 6 Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 5
aprelia 1985 g. 0 khode vypolneniia sudami estonskoi SSR
postanovleniia Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 25 iiunia 1976 g
0 praktike primeneniia sudami zakonodatel'stva 0 bor'be s
retsidivnoi prestupnost'iu," BVS SSSR, 1985, No. 3, p. 30.
151
Soviet, Revising Its Laws, May End Internal Exile," New
York Times, Nov. 10, 1987.
152Zhurnaly Vvsochaishe uchrezhdennoi Kommisii o
Meropriiatiiakh po otemene ssylki (St. Petersburg, 1900).
153Sovremennve tendentsii razvitiia sotsialisticheskogo
uglovnogo prava (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), p. 102.
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154Aleksei Lebedev, "Pridonnyi sloi," Ogonek, 1987, No. 8,
pp. 12-13. See Lit. gaz., May 28, 1986, July 22, 1987, Oct. 21,
1987.
155Ger P. van den Berg, The Soviet System of Justice:
Figures and Policy (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985); Ger P.
van den Berg, "Judicial Statistics in a Period of Glasnost',"
Review of Socialist Law, 13 (1987), 299.
156"V Ministerstve iustitsii SSSR," Izvestia, Oct. 10, 1987,
p? 8.
157-
New York Times, Dec. 28, 1987, p. 1; V. Korneyev, "Iz
kompetentnykh istochnikov" (Police briefing on Arbat crime),
Izvestia, Oct. 30, 1987; A. Illesh, "Militsia i glasnost',"
Izvestia, Dec. 28, 1987, p. 4.
158New York Times, Dec. 10?, 1987.
159D. Gutenev, "On the Fronts of the Ideological Struggle:
Behind a Religious Cover," Kazakhstanskaia pravda, Aug. 20, 1986,
p. 3; CDSP, Vol. 38, No. 4, p. 19.
160S. Gusev, "Presekat' prestupnuiu nazhivu, Sots. zak.,
1987, No. 1, p. 6 and S. Gusev, "Aktual'nye problemy bor'by
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pravookhranitel'nykh organov s netruovymi dokhodami," Sovetskoe
dosudarstvo i pravo, 1987, No. 2, p. 58.
p. 8.
161"V Ministerstve iustitsii SSSR," Izvestia, Oct. 10, 1987,
162A. Ershov, "Konflikt po lysoi gore: o newobychnom
sudebnom protsesse," Izvestia, Dec. 17, 1987, P. 3.
163Interview with A.V. Vlasov, "02 slushaet . .
aaz., March 18, 1987, No. 12, p. 6.
? f
" Lit.
164?V Verkhovnom Sude SSSR," Izvestia, June 4, p. 6; "V
Verkhovnom Sude SSSR," Pravda, Aug. 28, 1986, p. 6; "V Sudebnoi
kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR," BVS SSSR,
1986, No. 6, p. 28; E. Zhbanov, "Sudebnyi ocherk. Delo o
khlopke," Izvestia, Sept. 5, 1986, p. 6 and (Part II) Sept. 6, p.
3.
165Selskaia zhizn', March 24, 1985, p. 4.
166A. Illesh, "Razmyshleniia posle suda. V kontse chernogo
khoda," Izvestia, Feb. 6, 1986, p. 6; "S chernoga khoda,"
Izvestia, July, 16; 1984, p. 6.
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167??
v Sudebnoi kollegii po ugolovnym delam Verkhovnogo Suda
SSSR," BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 4, p. 47.
168E. Matskevich, "Surovoe nakazanie podstrekateliam i
khuliganam," Izvestia, June 23, 1987, p. 6; CDSP, 1987, No. 25,
p. 21.
169Izvestia, June 12, 1986, p. 4 (Federenko);
June 21, 1986 (Federenko executed)
Izvestia,
1700 plane podgotovki zakonodatel'nykh aktov RSFSR,
postanovlanii Pravitel'stva RSFSR i predlozhenii pa
sovershenstvovaniiu zakonodatel'stva RSFSR na 1987-1990 gody, SP
RSFSR, 1987, no. 5, item 40.
171See also, 0 razdele "Zakonodatel'stvo o pravosudii,
arbitrazhe i okhrane pravoporiadka" Svoda zakonov RSFSR. SP
RSFSR, 1986, no. 18, p. 338.
1720 plane podgovtovki zakonodatel'nykh aktov SSSR,
postanovlenii Pravitel'stva SSSR i predlozhenii pa
sovershenstvovaniiu zaknodatel'stva SSSR na 1986-1990 gody. Ved.
SSSR, 1986, no. 37, item 782.
I
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17
3Soviet, Revising Its Laws, May End Internal Exile," New
York Times, Nov. 10, 1987.
174nSOvetskomu pravosudiiu--70 let: zakon i tol'ko zakon,"
(Interview with V.I. Terebilov by G. Ovcharenko and A. Cherniak),
Pravda, Dec. 5, 1987, P. 3.
175Sofya Kelina, "Law in the Court of Time," Moscow News,
1987, No. 34, p. 13; "Bremia milovat'" (Aleksandr Maksimovich
Iakovlev interviewd by Alla Alova), Ogonek, 1987, No. 33, pp. 28-
31; Aleksandr Iakovlev, interview in Washington Post, Sept. 22,
1987.
176See Ben de Jong, "'An Intolerable Kind of Moral
Degeneration'; Homosexuality in the Soviet Union," Review of
Socialist Law, 4 (1982), 341.
177Sofya Kelina, "Law in the Court of Time," Moscow News,
1987, No. 34, p. 13; Aleksandr Iakovlev, interview in Washinton
Post, Sept. 22, 1987.
178Moskovskii komosmolets cited in Radio Liberty, The USSR
This Week, March 27 at March 24.
1791.Moral' i pravo: v pol'zu sparvedlivosti" (Interview
with A. Iakovlev), Lit. gaz., Sept. 24, 1986, p. 13.
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J.- $
126
180V.I. Terebilov, "XXVII Sftezd KPSS i zadachi pa
sovershenstovaniiu sudebnoi deiatel'nosti," BVS SSSR, 1986, No.
3, p. 4.
181Evgenii Zhbanov, "Komandirovka pa pros'be chitatelei.
Vokrug versii," Izvestia, Sept. 12, 1987, p. 4; "Sudebnyi
ocherk. Chastnoe opredelenie kotorogo ne bylo," Lit. caz., Jan.
15, 1987, p. 14.
182,
"Obed na peske," Lit. caz., Jan. 16, 1985, p. 12; Lit
claz., March 20, 1985, p. 13; "Ofitsial'nyi otvet, "Obed na
peske," Lit. gaz., Sept. 11, 1985, p. 13.
183Peter H. Solomon, Jr., "The Case of the Vanishing
Acquittal: Informal Norms and the Practice of Soviet Criminal
Justice," Working Paper #28, January 1987, Soviet Interview
Project, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
184V.I. Terebilov, "XXVII Suezd KPSS i zadachi pa
sovershenstovaniiu sudebnoi deiatel'nosti," BVS SSSR, 1986, No.
3, p. 4.
185Postanovlenie No. 15 Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 5
dekabria 1986 g., 0 dal'neishem ukreplenii zakonnosti pri
osushchestvlenii pravosudiia, BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 1, p. 8.
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p? 3;
127
186Case of O.M. Shemaeva, BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 4, P. 18.
187?Ne otbiraite u Femedy mech," Izvestia, Dec. 23, 1987,
reply by Iu. Feofanov, "U Femedy est' i vesy," Izvestia,
Dec. 23, 1987, p. 3.
18801ga Chaikovskaia and G. Anashkin, "Moral' i pravo.
Navet? Ne veriu!," Lit. gaz., April 15, 1987, p. 11.
189TASS interview with Deputy Justice Minister Vladirm
Gubarev, Radio Liberty Daily Report, Dec. 4, 1987. Iurii
Feofanov, "Delo," Izvestia, Sept. 26, 1988, p. 3.
190V. Savitskii, "Vozvrashcahaias' k teme: REputatsiia
azshchitnika," Pravda, Nov. 15, 1987, p. 3.
191"Pravovaia sistema: puti perestroiki. Zhaloba na
prigovor," Pravda, Aug. 1, 1987, p. 3; Postanovlenie No. 2
Plenuma Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR ot 5 aprelia 1985 g. 0 preimenenii
sudami zakonodatel'stva, reglamentiruiushchego presmotr v
poriadke nadzora prigovorov opredelenii, postanovlenii po
ugolovnym delam, BVS SSSR, 1985, No. 3, p. 18. "Rassmotrenie
sudami ugolovnykh del v poriadke nadzora (Obzor sudebnoi
praktiki)," BVS SSSR, 1986, No. 4, p. 43. "Sovershenstvovat'
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128
nadzor za sudebnoi deiatel'nost'iu," BVS SSSR, 1987, No. 2, p.
42.
192V1adimir Kardin, "Crime and Punishment: Discussing Legal
Issues," Moscow News, 1987, No. 16, p. 13; Sofia Kelina, "But
Not at Once!," Moscow News, 1987, No. 16, p. 13; Vladimir
Kardin, "Execute or Pardon: Reply to Opponents," Moscow News,
1987, No. 25, P-
2; Alexei Karatayev, "Capital Punishment is No
Guarantee," Moscow News, 1987, No. 50, p. 15.
193"Bremia milovat'" (Aleksandr Maksimovich Iakovlev
interviewd by Alla Alova), Oaonek, 19E17, No. 33, pp. 28-31; "Po
zakonam mirnogo vremeni" (Alla Alova publishes and discusses
readers' replies to Iakovlev: one lawyer's reply says, "Use of
the death penalty should be greatly enlarged. These damned
driveling liberals must be rejected.") Ogonek, No. 49, Dec.
1987, pp. 26-28;
194Radio Liberty, The USSR This Week, May 8, 1987 at May 4.
195Soviet, Revising Its Laws, May End Internal Exile," New
York Times, Nov. 10, 1987. TABS ?report of a news conference by
Sukharev, Radio Liberty, The USSR This Week, Nov. 2, 1987, at
Oct. 31.
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196T. Zaslavskaia, "Voprosy teorii" Perestroika i
sotsiologia," Pravda, Feb. 6, 1987, p. 2-3; Alexei Karataev,
"Capital Punishment is No Guarantee," Moscow News, 1987, No. 50,
p. 15.
1
197"V Politburo TsK KPSS," Izvestia, April 4, 1987, p 1, col
198V. Savitskii, "Pravovaia sistema--puti perestroiki:
Prestizh advokatury," Pravda, March 22, p. 3.
199flPo zakonam mirnogo vremeni" Ogonek, No. 49, Dec. 1987,
pp. 26-28; Sovetskaia Rossiia, Aug. 14, 1987, p. 6, translated
as "Grey Fence," CDSP, 1987, No. 37, p. 12.
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