According to Western experts, robberies, homicide and other violent crimes in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

were less prevalent than in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territo ...

because the Soviet Union had a larger police force and had a low occurrence of drug abuse. Corruption in the form of bribery was common, primarily due to the paucity of goods and services on the open market.

Ideology

Soviet criminology was significantly influenced by the works of Stalinist prosecutor

Andrey Vyshinsky Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (russian: Андре́й Януа́рьевич Выши́нский; pl, Andrzej Wyszyński) ( – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat. He is known as a state prosecutor of Josep ...

who introduced a number of measures into the penal code and investigatory practice that were unusual in other legal systems. Law was to be perceived not as means of determining individual guilt but dialectically and as part of broader

class struggle Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society because of socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor. The forms ...

. Based on that premise, people could be convicted even with absence of actual crime but if they merely belonged to a vaguely defined

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. Th ...

class or if their conviction would be broadly beneficial for the revolutionary movement. Apart from this judicial practice, the penal code of USSR contained a number of very specific crimes generally classified as "counter-revolutionary", such as contacts with foreigners or any other kind of opposition or criticism of the communist party. Article 70 listed "anti-Soviet propaganda". Article 83 - "illegally leaving USSR". Article 190-1 punished dissemination, "in verbal form", of "knowingly false" statements, defaming USSR or its social structure.

Speculation In finance, speculation is the purchase of an asset (a commodity, goods, or real estate) with the hope that it will become more valuable shortly. (It can also refer to short sales in which the speculator hopes for a decline in value.) Many ...

, defined as any form of private trade with intent to make profit, was also a crime per article 154 of the Penal Code of USSR. Article 162 made a crime engaging in "banned" crafts or forms of employment. A basic premise of

Marxism Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialec ...

is that

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Ca ...

is a socio-economic phenomenon: Some Marxist theorists contended that the most immediate reasons for crime in the Soviet Union were

mental retardation Intellectual disability (ID), also known as general learning disability in the United Kingdom and formerly mental retardation,Rosa's Law, Pub. L. 111-256124 Stat. 2643(2010). is a generalized neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by signific ...

, poor upbringing, and

capitalist Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private ...

influence. This led to novel inventions in the field of psychiatry ("delusion of reformism", sluggish schizophrenia) used as an instrument of repression against critics.

Punishment

In 1989 the Soviet Union had few prisons. About 99% of convicted criminals served their sentences in labor camps, supervised by the Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps which was under the MVD. The camps had four regimes of ascending severity. In the strict-regime camps, inmates worked at the most difficult jobs, usually outdoors, and received meager rations. Jobs were less demanding and rations better in the camps with milder regimes. The system of corrective labor was regarded by Soviet authorities successful in that the rate of recidivism was quite low. Prisons and labor camps, in the views of former inmates and Western observers, however, were notorious for their harsh conditions, arbitrary and sadistic treatment of prisoners, and flagrant human rights abuses. In 1989 new legislation, which emphasized rehabilitation rather than punishment, was being drafted to "humanize" the special system. Nevertheless, in 1989 conditions for many prisoners had changed little. Relocation of petty criminals outside of large cities was also quite common practice of crime management.

Death penalty

The death penalty, carried out by shooting, was applied in the Soviet Union only in cases of

treason Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplo ...

espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangibl ...

terrorism Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violen ...

sabotage Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. One who engages in sabotage is a ''saboteur''. Saboteurs typically try to conceal their identitie ...

, certain types of

murder Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. ("The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the ...

, and large-scale

theft Theft is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. The word ''theft'' is also used as a synonym or informal shorthand term for some ...

of state property by officials. Otherwise, the maximum punishment for a first offender was fifteen years. Parole was permitted in some cases after completion of half of the sentence, and periodic amnesties sometimes also resulted in early release.

Collapse of the Soviet Union

Near and after the

collapse of the Soviet Union The dissolution of the Soviet Union, also negatively connoted as rus, Разва́л Сове́тского Сою́за, r=Razvál Sovétskogo Soyúza, ''Ruining of the Soviet Union''. was the process of internal disintegration within the Sov ...

, crime statistics moved sharply and uniformly upward. From 1991 to 1992, the number of officially reported crimes and the overall crime rate each showed a 27 percent increase; the crime rate nearly doubled between 1985 and 1992. By the early 1990s, theft, burglary, and other acts against property accounted for about two-thirds of all crime in Russia. Of particular concern to citizens, however, was the rapid growth of violent crime, including gruesome

homicide Homicide occurs when a person kills another person. A homicide requires only a volitional act or omission that causes the death of another, and thus a homicide may result from accidental, reckless, or negligent acts even if there is no inten ...

s. Large parts of the Penal Code concerning crimes such as private trade (art. 154), criticism of the communist party and other political crimes (art. 58) were revoked in 1993.

References

{{Crime in Europe Capital punishment in the Soviet Union

Ideology

Punishment

Death penalty

Collapse of the Soviet Union

See also

References