Bills on indeterminate sentences at the end of NEP

Abstract

The article discusses a number of bills of the late 1920s containing a proposal to introduce the institution of indeterminate sentences into Soviet criminal law. The initiative to develop the bills came from the people’s commissariats of justice and internal affairs. The projects were based on a scientific basis, as well as on the wide practice of parole from places of deprivation of liberty. Based on archival sources and published materials, the position of the leadership of both departments on this issue in the late 1920s was studied. The author comes to the conclusion that despite the external similarity of the views of the representatives of the two departments, in fact, they fundamentally differed. The leadership of the NKVD (E. G. Shirvindt, V. R. Yakubson) considered indeterminate sentences from the point of view of correcting the term of imprisonment as a result of observing the evolution of the personality of convicts in places of detention. The People’s Commissariat of Justice (N. V. Krylenko) saw in vague sentences the possibility of unlimited repression against socially dangerous persons. The planned innovations, as it turned out, contradicted the All-Union criminal legislation. The study of the fate of the institution of indeterminate sentences in Soviet legislation allows us to better understand the factors influencing the development of the branch of Soviet criminal and corrective labor law in the 1920s.

References

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