Russian Legal Culture Before and After Communism: Criminal Justice, Politics, and the Public Sphere by Frances Nethercott

Author:Frances Nethercott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2011-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

Thus, rather than rely on ‘external’ definitions of civic rights and duties – the holy of holies for old liberals but also a beacon for their young rival democrats – the new ‘liberals’ prioritized the ‘internal’, ethical notion of the human soul and of human dignity.

In conjunction with advances in juridical scholarship and philosophy of law, the opening decade of the twentieth century witnessed an increase in popular juridical literature, the purpose of which was to encourage obshchestvennost’. The social democrat M.N. Gernet (1874–1953), perhaps best known in the Soviet Union for his four-volume study of the tsarist prison system published in the 1940s, was responsible for numerous publications in the pre-Revolutionary era – textbooks, collective essays, and bibliographical compilations – in which he emphasized the underlying social–political weaponry to be gained from juridical knowledge. The preface to his 1906 textbook Basic Concepts of Russian State, Civil and Criminal Law, co-authored with fellow privat-dotsenty V.M. Ustinov and I.V. Novotsky, was emphatic in its message: knowledge of law encourages awareness among the people in their role as ‘active citizens’ whose voices count in the governing process of the country – in short, it is necessary ‘for every thinking Russian citizen in the current period of our history’.6 In addition to his efforts to ensure the dissemination of juridical knowledge and to anchor it in the public sphere, Gernet played a key role in the public outcry against the death penalty and in condemning the government backlash against revolutionaries.7 A committed socialist – he believed that criminal law reflects class interests – Gernet’s publications are symptomatic of that ‘ethos of enlightenment’ which his generation inherited from early ‘liberal’ reformers, only now adapted to overtly different political ends.8

Although not representing a theoretically unified corpus, the body of literature written in the opening decades of the new century helped forge what one might call a criminal law canon. Equally significantly, many of the works discussed in this chapter contained a vision of the social and educative role of law in a state that continued to withhold, or restrict, basic rights. In addition, public awareness of the uses and abuses of justice was sharpened in response to aggressive government measures in the wake of the 1905 Revolution. As I argue below, the issue of the death penalty not only figured on the Duma agenda; as a topic of urgent debate among public figures, literati, as well as the judiciary, it reached a wider audience, generating an attitude that was hostile to the regime.

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