This book is a compilation of twelve chapters authored by an international group of scholars. It is organized chronologically, with four chapters on the 1930s, three on late Stalinism, and four on the Khrushchev era, all dealing with various aspects of Soviet criminal justice or other methods of social control. The editors assert that “social control in the Soviet Union was not entirely about the monolithic state imposing its vision with violent force” and that “agency” at various bureaucratic levels and among the general population made social control a messy and contradictory process (3). Such arguments are less novel than claimed in the introduction, but the volume succeeds in providing fascinating glimpses at “pockets for agency [that] persisted between and within state institutions” (14). This was a state comprised of people, we are reminded, who had conflicting values and loyalties and who often worked at cross purposes.
The first chapter by Aaron B. Retish investigates court-mandated alimony and child support payments, designed to prevent juvenile delinquency and enforce the social norm of equity in Soviet society. Yet this was not straightforward. Judicial officials and the public hotly debated how much money was appropriate, and although the courts consistently sided with abandoned mothers, men often avoided payment through flight or by lowering their claimed income. Next, Samantha Lomb details how various officials debated taxation levels for small landowners who refused to join collective farms. Surprisingly, some even lost their jobs for doing what they thought correct—enforcing high tax rates and then seizing holdout farms when smallholders fell into arrears. Here we see a theme developed throughout the volume: “the way the central state viewed and interacted with individual smallholding peasants differed greatly from the way district officials viewed and interacted with them and tried to exert control” (68).
The third chapter by Maria Starun focuses on disciplinary bodies and practices in the Soviet industrial space, arguing that these were used to promote a particular vision of society but often clashed with the 1930s industrial culture that was hyper-focused on output. For instance, workers frequently brought cases of slandered personal dignity and sexual harassment to the comrades’ courts rather than focusing on the labor discipline that mattered most to the regime. Timothy K. Blauvelt then provides a case study of a Georgian secret policeman who was prosecuted in 1957 for his crimes during the Great Terror. Claims of simply following orders and not knowing the illegality of his actions fell on deaf ears and he subsequently died in a labor camp.
The second chronological section of the book starts with a chapter by Alan Barenberg on debates surrounding hard labor (katorga) sentences. He demonstrates how complicated penal policy was, both in decision-making circles in Moscow and as implemented in the camps themselves, as various actors weighed the conflicting aims of retribution, isolation, and economic productivity (and perhaps re-education). Such complexities “reveal the limitations of any attempt to view the Gulag through a single explanatory lens” (156). Juliette Cadiot's chapter presents a nuanced view of pardon requests made by Gulag inmates incarcerated for theft. These plaintive petitions bore witness that “the Soviet Union remained populated by legions of the poor, the marginalized, and the excluded” both despite and because of the regime's policies (176). Amanda McNair's chapter then investigates how the state attempted to boost birth rates after World War II, in part by aggressively prosecuting women and doctors for performing abortions. However, physicians “only half-heartedly complied with the surveillance system” designed to monitor pregnant women and the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Health squabbled endlessly over how and when to bring women and doctors to trial (190). Neither, it turned out, was very interested in prosecuting abortion cases as mandated by Moscow.
The last section, on the Nikita Khrushchev era, begins with Immo Rebitschek's account of juvenile delinquency. Here he finds contentious debates across various agencies about whether to treat young troublemakers as “neglected” or “criminal. Ultimately, there emerged a better distinction in the post-Stalin era “between social care and penal system” as the power of the police waned (231). Yoram Gorlizki's chapter explores how dramatic population shifts in the 1950s associated with the partial dismantling of Stalin's legal and penal regimes and with new economic programs (the Virgin Lands campaign) produced rampant social disorder and vigorous discussion between the ideals of “socialist legality” and “the protection of public order” (239). Ultimately, Gorlizki argues, Khrushchev failed to maintain an acceptable level of order, with the regular police (militsiia) in particular unable to rid itself of the abuses and ineffectiveness of the Stalin era. The result was public outcry and Khrushchev's ouster.
Evgenia Lezina's chapter on the KGB focuses on the use of preventive measures (profilaktika), both directly and through its agent-informant network, which to some extent replaced punitive measures that the secret police was known for under Stalin. Dina Moyal then explores judicial housing disputes, showing how ordinary people effectively mobilized the idea of socialist legality and Khrushchev's promises for greater material prosperity to claim their right to housing. In the absence of free speech and press, post-Soviet courts provided an effective avenue for Soviet subjects to express such grievances. Yet they also, in the process, “participated in supervising and monitoring the behaviour of their fellow neighbours, family members, co-workers, and even law officials” (316).
In sum, Social Control Under Stalin and Khrushchev boasts a number of useful and well researched case studies dealing with the intertwined themes of social control, individual agency, center-periphery tensions, and citizen-vs-state power dynamics. David Shearer's conclusion does well to place the chapters within the existing historiographical framework. Together, they help detail the varied ways in which the “perfect, well-ordered proletarian state was impossible to realize” (15).
