Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw

Notes

209 Notes Introduction 1. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), fond (f.) 9474, opis’ (op.) 16, delo (d.) 645, list (l.) 54. 2. Tsentral’nyi munitsipal’nyi arkhiv g. Moskvy (TsMAM), f. 493, op. 1, d. 420, l. 72. In another sex-related case, a woman was arrested for hooliganism and sentenced to four years for having sex “on the riverbank close to the road.” Interestingly, her male partner was given only a fifteen-day administrative punishment. For this case, see GARF, f. 9474, op. 1, d. 469, ll. 96–97. For the case of a woman whose communal apartment neighbors denounced her as a hooligan for bringing multiple sex partners to her room, see TsMAM, f. 1918, op. 2, d. 92, ll. 3–4. 3. GARF, f. A-428, op. 3, d. 443, l. 35. 4. R. W. Burchfield, ed., A Supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 2 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1976), 145–146. The dictionary also lists such little used derivatives as the adjective “hooliganic” and the verb “to hooliganize.” 5. As the subject of sensationalized crime reporting and music hall burlesque, the hooligan straddled the worlds of popular anxiety and popular entertainment. For the possible derivations of the word, see Sean McMahon and Jo O’ Donoghue, Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), 375–376; Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (New York: Routledge, 1984), 1383; and Hugh Rawson, Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses, Insults, Put-Downs, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from the AngloSaxon Times to the Present (New York: Crown, 1989), 197–198. For a treatment of hooliganism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, see Geoffrey Pearson, Hooliganism: A History of Respectable Fears (New York: Schocken Books, 1984); and Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1981). For an interesting firsthand account of the early English hooligans, see 210 Notes to pages 4–5 Clarence Rook, The Hooligan Nights: Being the Life and Opinions of an Unrepentant Criminal (London: G. Richards, 1901). 6. This does not mean that there were not examples of soccer hooliganism in the Soviet Union. For cases of soccer hooliganism during this period, see Sem Narin’iani, “V odnom gorode,” Komsomolskaia pravda, October 29, 1955, 2; and A. Akimov, “Silovaia bor’ba? Net, grubost’,” Izvestiia, May 31, 1959, 6. For a cartoon on outrageous fan behavior in the soccer stadium, see the cartoon “There Are All Kinds of Spectators at the Stadiums,” Krokodil, no. 31 (1955): 1. For information on soccer hooliganism during the Soviet period, see Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sport in the USSR (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 53, 56, 95, 99, 210, 213. 7. Depending on the year, hooliganism was either the first or second most common offense tried in Soviet criminal courts. The only other crime that was as common was petty theft of state and public property (melkoe khishchenie gosudarstvennogo i obshchestvennogo imushchestva). For more information on the frequency of hooliganism over the Khrushchev period, see GARF, f. 9474, op. 16, d. 644, l. 57; and GARF, f. 9474, op. 1, d. 418, ll. 78–80. 8. GARF, f. 9474, op. 1, d. 418, l. 83. 9. At the beginning of the Khrushchev period on April 1, 1953, hooligans formed 6.5 percent of the Gulag’s total inmate population (2,224,566). The percentage of inmates in the Gulag for treason (the largest contingent of the counterrevolutionary crimes group) was only slightly higher at 8.3 percent. For the full population breakdown, see Marc Elie, “Les anciens détenus du Goulag: libérations massives, réinsertion et réhabilitation dans l’URSS poststalinienne, 1953–1964” (PhD diss., L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2007), 451. The reader who wants to learn more about crime, prisoners, amnesties, and much more during the Khrushchev era could do little better than to consult Elie’s admirable and exhaustive work. 10. Gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917–1960, ed. A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2000), 437. This shift in the criminal composition of the detainee population towards offenses like hooliganism and away from counterrevolutionary crimes was due to changes in amnesty policies and crime-fighting priorities after 1955 that favored the expansion of the former cohort and the shrinkage of the latter. For more on these internal shifts in the Gulag, see...