Soviet Criminal Justice and the Great Terror

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 46, Heft 3-4, S. 391-413

Abstract

Years ago Harold Berman observed that for many people in the west the term Soviet law represented a contradiction. Popular imagination found little place for law or criminal justice in a society where terror or extralegal coercion played a major role. Yet, as Berman argued, even in Stalin's Russia law and force existed side by side, and there was a "surprising degree of official compartmentalization of the legal and the extra-legal." Berman recognized that the separation of law and terror was no accident; rather it was a product of the regime's commitment to law and the functions it could perform for a stable, conservative social order. Three decades later western Sovietologists are only starting to come to terms with the conservative phase of Stalin's rule; and, despite a fine essay by Robert Sharlet, the promotion of law has yet to be incorporated into the standard portrait of Stalinism. A major reason is the continuation of doubts about the possibilities for law where terror also reigns.