The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union, 1954-1991 by Yana Skorobogatov
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Killing the Soviet Man: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union, 1954-1991 By Yana Skorobogatov A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair Professor Victoria Frede Professor Joan H. Neuberger Professor Daniel J. Sargent Professor Jonathan Simon Summer 2018 Abstract Killing the Soviet Man: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union, 1954-1991 by Yana Skorobogatov Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair This dissertation examines the history of popular engagement with the Soviet criminal justice system from the Khrushchev era to the present. Specifically, it is the first history of the Soviet death penalty, one that traces the effect it had on ordinary people and how it shaped their perceptions of the Soviet state, the law, and socialist ideology from the “Thaw” to the country’s collapse in 1991. In the decades following Stalin’s death, courtrooms across the Soviet Union became sites of a new and intense form of civic engagement. In 1954, the country’s leadership reinstated the death penalty for non-political crimes, overturning a Stalin-era decree that abolished the death penalty in times of peace. Over the next thirty-seven years, courts across the Soviet Union sentenced a combined 33, 329 people to death. This phenomenon transformed the lives not just of the executed, but their mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, co-workers, friends, and members of their communities. Many of these people possessed little to no knowledge of Soviet laws or the legal system that administered them. This all changed once they found themselves occupying a position where each word they uttered and each action they took meant the difference between life and death for the accused. Rather than stand idle while the Soviet state decided who should live and die, these people intervened in the judicial process to express grievances, convey demands, and articulate their own visions of justice and legality. Interventions like these had a profound impact both for the accused and those who defended or denied their right to live. By exposing them to the inner workings of the most sensitive branch of the Russian legal and judicial system, the death penalty process offered ordinary people an education in Soviet morality, law, and governance, empowering them to acquire novels forms of legal and procedural knowledge that, I argue, engendered their transformation from Soviet subjects to Soviet citizens. This dissertations argues that the Soviet criminal justice system created a distinctive space for knowledge acquisition, legal debate, and popular engagement with the Soviet state from 1954 to 1991. Following legal professionals and ordinary citizens as they adjudicated individual capital cases, I examine how the legal, moral, and procedural norms that undergirded the Soviet death penalty helped usher in the development of a legal consciousness qualitatively distinct from “socialist legality,” the post-Stalinist legal philosophy upheld by the country’s legal and political elites. I analyze how people took advantage of innovations like the open courtroom, psychiatric screenings, and 1 appellate review to advocate on behalf of their own interests and those of their kith, kin, and local communities. I build my social analysis on a diverse set of archival primary sources, namely, a classified collection of 109 death penalty case files that span the 1945-1991 period, housed in the Central Archive of the Moscow Region. Untouched since they were originally compiled, these case files contain court transcripts, forensic evaluations, crime scene photographs, psychiatric reports, written verdicts, appeal letters, and citizen complaints. Together they describe how ordinary people and state officials navigated through the death penalty process. Through a close social historical reading of these sources, I uncover the ways in which ordinary citizens used the legal innovations made available to them through the capital litigation process to lay claims to citizenship in new and profound ways. My dissertation uncovers the late socialist period as a transformative moment of identity formation in the post-Stalin and late socialist period. In the fields of Soviet and Russian history, it demonstrates the central place of Soviet law in the production of late-Soviet identity. 2 To my father, Boris i Acknowledgments This dissertation took a village to write. Or, should I say, a mir. I will begin first with my dissertation committee. Yuri Slezkine’s brilliance shaped each and every word on the pages that follow. I am forever grateful for his support, mentorship, and friendship. He will be dismayed by the cliché that opens these acknowledgements. Victoria Frede’s careful, thorough, critical feedback sharpened my analysis and removed many ugly typos. Anyone who gets to have her edit their work is very, very lucky. Joan Neuberger is my spirit historian. Her rigorous, sometimes ruthless, but always compassionate feedback got me through the final months of writing this dissertation, and the past decade of my life in general. Daniel Sargent was an early supporter of my academic career. He was the one who told me to go to graduate school, and accepted me as a transfer student in 2012. He is a true institution builder and a spirited colleague (and a patient intellectual sparing partner). I will miss the time we spent sifting through our different feelings about Henry Kissinger. Finally, Jonathan Simon provided many thought-provoking and challenging afternoon discussions about Derrida, Foucault, Benjamin, Fanon and others who laid the theoretical foundation for this dissertation. I could think of few more pleasant ways to spend one’s time than talking about Discipline and Punish in his sunny office at Boalt Law with sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. I feel like the luckiest human in the world to have spent the majority of my academic career in Dwinelle Hall as a member of the UC Berkeley History Department. Several members of the department’s faculty and staff provided invaluable support to this project and to me personally. First and foremost, Mabel Lee guided me through the bureaucratic tornado that is UC Berkeley with care, compassion, empathy, and her beautiful smile. Margaret Chowning, John Connelly, David Henkin, Rebecca Herman, Thomas Lacquer, James Vernon, and Felicia Viator offered illuminating feedback and support at critical moments and often on short notice. Caitlin Rosenthal trained me in quantitative methods and deserves credit for the graphs included here. Todd Kuebler and Erin Leigh Inama always picked up my calls and chatted with me in the hallway, and Marianne Bartholomew- Couts worked hard to keep the department running as smoothly as possible despite extreme austerity measures and many disruptive institutional changes. Funding for this dissertation came mostly from UC Berkeley institutions. The Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies supported me financially, personally, and academically since day one. It’s hard to imagine what Russian studies at Berkeley would be without Zachary Kelly, Jeffrey Pennington, Ned Walker, and Jason Wittenberg. I am honored to be one of the many historians of Russia to have benefited from the Reginald E. Zelnik Memorial Endowment Fund. I am grateful for the work that Pam Zellik, Elaine Zeilnik, Jaxon Zelnik-Stuhr, and Mark Stuhr do to promote Reggie’s legacy by supporting graduate studies. The Institute for International Studies (IIS) awarded me two awards, the John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship in International and Comparative Studies and the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, which gave me the time and security I needed to write this dissertation. I owe John Connelly (again) and Rexille Uy for supporting Russian studies through their work at IIS. Finally, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) awarded me a Dissertation Research Grant for an important research trip in 2017. I began my graduate career at the University of Texas at Austin, where I first learned how to read and write like a historian. Joan Neuberger deserves another acknowledgement as perhaps the first person who believed seriously in my potential as a historian. She ii admitted me into UT’s PhD program as a waitlisted student, told me that I’d get off the waitlist, and made good on her promise (she doesn’t know how to do otherwise). I will always remember our conversations in her office, over coffee, and Negronis, about everything from film to feminism to Goop to Occupy Wall Street. Charters Wynn provided me with my first real training in Soviet history. I am grateful to him for the time he gave me to read slowly, write critically, and find my voice in the seminar setting. Other faculty who read and provided illuminating and encouraging feedback for my words include Mark Lawrence, Frank Gavin, Tony Hopkins, Jeremi Suri, and William H. Brands. Marilyn E. Lehman provided valuable assistance as the department’s Graduate Program Administrator. Finally, several UT graduate students joined me on much-needed breaks spent swimming at Barton Springs and dancing in honkytonks, especially Katherine Cox, Peter Hamilton, and Michael Roberts. The warm archival staff that helped me navigate through my research year in Moscow made my time there both possible and unbelievably productive. I spent what felt like forever at the Central Archive of the Moscow Region, whose fabulous employees provided me with cheer, laughter, and what felt like a million cups of tea. Lena, Guliia, Natasha, and Andrei welcomed me with open arms and made a makeshift reading room for me in their office, while Iuliia Nikolaevna Gerasimova provided special assistance and access. At the Levada Center, Nataliia Zorkaia and Ekaterina Kochergina sat down with me and helped me dig through their databases of public opinion polls.