Crime And Punishment In The Russian Revolution

Russians from all walks of life joyously celebrated the end of Nicholas II’s monarchy, but one year later, amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people.

Author's Note -- Part I: Last Years of the Old Empire, 1904-1914 -- Part II: The Great War : Imperial Self-Destruction -- The Great War Begins -- Germans, Jews, Armenians -- Tearing Themselves Apart -- Conflict and Collapse -- Part III: 1917 : Contest for Control -- Five Days that Shook the World -- The Provisional Government and the War -- August-September : From Putsch to Coup -- Bolshevik October -- Death of the Constituent Assembly -- Politics from Below -- Part IV: Sovereign Claims -- The Peace that Wasn't -- Treason and Terror -- Finland's Civil War -- Baltic Entanglements -- Ukrainian Drama, Act I -- Colonial Repercussions -- Part V: War Within -- The Unquiet Don -- Foreign Bodies -- Trotsky Arms, Siberia Mobilizes -- Kolchak : the Wild East -- Ukraine, Act II -- War Against the Cossacks -- Miracle on the Vistula -- War Against the Jews : 1919-1920 -- The Last Page -- War Against the Peasants -- Part VI: Victory and Retreat -- The Proletariat in the Proletarian Dictatorship -- The Revolution Turns Against Itself -- Conclusion: Revolution Against Itself

Crime and Punishment in Russia surveys the evolution of criminal justice in Russia during a span of more than 300 years, from the early modern era to the present day. Maps, organizational charts, a list of important dates, and a glossary help the reader to navigate key institutional, legal, political, and cultural developments in this evolution. The book approaches Russia both on its own terms and in light of changes in Europe and the wider West, to which Russia's rulers and educated elites continuously looked for legal models and inspiration. It examines the weak advancement of the rule of the law over the period and analyzes the contrasts and seeming contradictions of a society in which capital punishment was sharply restricted in the mid-1700s, while penal and administrative exile remained heavily applied until 1917 and even beyond. Daly also provides concise political, social, and economic contextual detail, showing how the story of crime and punishment fits into the broader narrative of modern Russian history. This is an important and useful book for all students of modern Russian history as well as of the history of crime and punishment in modern Europe.

Eighteenth-century Russia -- Nineteenth-century Russia before the emancipation -- From the great reforms to revolution -- The era of Lenin -- The era of Stalin -- The USSR under "mature socialism"--Criminal justice since the collapse of communism -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- Works cited

Winner of the Cundill History Prize The House of the Dead tells the incredible hundred-year-long story of “the vast prison without a roof” that was Russia’s Siberian penal colony. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Russian Revolution, the tsars exiled more than a million prisoners and their families east. Here Daniel Beer illuminates both the brutal realities of this inhuman system and the tragic and inspiring fates of those who endured it. Siberia was intended to serve not only as a dumping ground for criminals and political dissidents, but also as new settlements. The system failed on both fronts: it peopled Siberia with an army of destitute and desperate vagabonds who visited a plague of crime on the indigenous population, and transformed the region into a virtual laboratory of revolution. A masterly and original work of nonfiction, The House of the Dead is the history of a failed social experiment and an examination of Siberia’s decisive influence on the political forces of the modern world.

A magisterial account of criminal law in early modern Russia in a wider European and Eurasian context.

This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality—and of peasants—with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.

Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.