LAW AND JUSTICE IN RUSSIA

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 264, 3 August 1929, Page 29

LAW AND JUSTICE IN RUSSIA

CRIME AND CLASS The Soviet judicial system, in many points of theory and practice, differs from those of Western Europe and America. Some salient features of the Soviet conceptions of laws and justice are brought out in the course of an interview, granted in written form to the writer by Mr. Nickolai Krilenko, Attorney-General of the Soviet Union and public prosecutor in many famous political cases (writes the “Observer’s” correspondent). The organisation of the Soviet courts, as outlined by Mr. Krilenko, may be briefly summarised as follows: Everyday cases are tried in so-called People’s Courts, consisting of a judge and two asssessors. More serious civil and criminal cases are heard in provincial courts, which also possess appellate functions and exercise general supervision over the conduct of the People’s courts. The tribunal of last appeal (although the All-Union Soviet Executive Committee always has the right to commute death sentences) is the Soviet Supreme Court, which also judges cases of exceptional political Importance, settles disputes between separate Soviet Republics, and is the authorised organ for the solution of questions of constitutional practice. To a question as to whether Soviet courts were bound to impose definite penalties for definite crimes, Mr. Krilenko replied: "The Soviet court applies repressions for concrete socially dangerous actions, but in determining its reprssions the court is bound to appraise the degree of social danger both of the crime and of the person who committed it. Since, depending upon changing and varied conditions, times, places, and the individual peculiarities of the criminals, the degree of danger in the same crime, under different circumstances, is not identical, the sentences of the Courts for crimes of the same kind are distinguished by considerable flexibility.”

Discussing the prison policy of the Soviet Government, Mr. Krilenko declared that the present tendency is to punish petty offenders with forced labour, reserving confinement in prison and exile for crimes of a more serious character. Among the characteristics of the administration of the existing prisons he emphasised educational work, aiming at the elimination of illiteracy and the organisation of manual training courses, the granting of vacations to prisoners (probably a unique Russian practice) and “the elimination from the prison regime of everything that is not connected with the problem of social safeguarding, that aims only at the suppression of the human dignity of the prisoner.” He gave as the figure for the number of persons now in confinement in Russia proper, excluding Ukraina, White Russia, TransCaucasia, and Central Asia 113,555, declaring that this was considerably below the corresponding pre-war figure. In reply to a question about the death sentence, Mr. Krilenko stated that “the application of this highest measure of social safeguarding by the courts is limited to crimes which are precisely mentioned in the Criminal Code, which represent the greatest social danger and strike at the bases of the Soviet order.” He added that in 1928 in Russia proper death sentences were passed on 479 persons. Of this number 289 were commuted by the Supreme Court, while the Soviet Executive Committee commuted about 30 per cent of the remainder. Mr. Krilenko declared that serious crimes in the Soviet Union had sharply diminished in comparison with pre-war times, and that a process of diminution had been noticeable ever since the end of the civil war, although there had been from time to time waves of certain kinds of criminality, such as hooliganism, bribe-taking, etc. The Soviet Attorney-General gave the following exposition of the principle of “class justice” which is so often mentioned in the proceedings of Soviet courts: —

“Consideration of the social position of the criminal is an obligatory, but not a decisive element in determining the measure of social safeguarding. Naturally, in the case of two, quite identical crimes, the Soviet court will act differently toward the bourgeois, who has committed the crime as a result of his class ideology and habits, and toward the toiler who has committed a crime from poverty or lack of civic consciousness. “But what is fundamental tn the class approach is not only, and not so much, the social position of the person who has committed the crime as, in the main, consideration of the social menace of the given person and the crime from the standpoint of the interests of the State of the proletarian dictatorship as a whole. Facts demonstrate that the majority of persons who commit the most socially dangerous crimes (counter-revolutionary and others) consist of kulak (rich peasant) and capitalist elements, while individual toilers participate in such crimes only in exceptional cases.”