Participation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ inspection in developing the idea of a unified investigative apparatus in the 1920s

Abstract

The article deals with one of the problematic issues related to the reorganization of enquiry and preliminary investigation, which were actively discussed during the NEP period. It is about the idea of creating a unified investigation apparatus by means of structural unification in one form or another of the bodies of enquiry and investigation (in some of the proposed projects — and criminal investigation). As an integral part of the process of such unification, the discussion on judicial militia, the beginning of which was laid in the pre-revolutionary period, is also considered. A significant contribution to the development of these problems was made by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate of the USSR, which conducted surveys of judicial, investigative and law enforcement agencies in the second half of the 1920s. The methods proposed by Rabkrin to improve the police’s work on enquiries were aimed, among other things, at creating a unified investigative apparatus in the future. These proposals after lengthy discussions found a normative embodiment. However, the idea of a unified investigative apparatus, despite its support by a significant part of justice officials and even an experimental project for the creation of such an apparatus, developed without the participation of the NK RKI, was not realized in the end.

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