Crime, Punishment, and the Early Soviet Camps

The years that immediately followed the collapse of 300 years of Romanov autocratic rule have been widely regarded as a laboratory in which the new Soviet experiment could take place. While numerous studies have looked to judge the immense explosion in literature and art of the New Economic Policy (NEP) period, the impact of revolutionary upheaval on criminological research has remained vastly understudied other than in a handful of works.¹ Similarly, accounts detailing the development of the Secret Police Camp system of the 1920s remain largely focused on replicating memoir sources with little acknowledgment of the inner workings of the institutions involved.² In both of these complementary fields, specific nuances have often been overlooked in favor of a rather deterministic view that leads directly to the growth of the Gulag apparatus in the 1930s, on the one hand, and the shunning of criminological theory in favor of the continued ascendancy of the security services, on the other.³ This chasm in the existing scholarship on crime and punishment across the 1917 divide is addressed by both Andrea Gullotta’s study of Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki and the various contributors to the edited volume Born to Be Criminal.

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The introduction to Born to Be Criminal, written by its editors Riccardo Nicolosi and Anne Hartmann, notes the intention of the volume to consider conceptions of criminality inherent in various disciplines, fields of research, and penal practice (1). This, they suggest, is best achieved through their tripartite structure, which looks at the influence of Cesare Lombroso’s highly controversial “Born Criminal” theory (from which the volume draws its title) in the late imperial period before considering the change in criminological discourse and judicial approaches toward crime following the 1917 revolutions and ending with a final section dedicated to how the criminal world is represented in the enormous pantheon of camp memoirs.⁴ Potentially as a result of its development from a conference program, and although the editors try willfully to link these three strands together, it is clear from the beginning that the third topic feels a little more disparate than the opening two, which benefit from a similar methodological approach and source base.

Nevertheless, the volume’s first section, “Inborn Criminality and the Late Russian Empire,” opens with Marina Mogilner’s insightful chapter on the empire-born criminal, in which the author’s strong theoretical underpinnings show the intriguing possibilities of linking relevant multidimensional approaches from the field of imperial studies with wider work on Lombroso.⁵ The next two chapters from Louise McReynolds and editor Nicolosi are both intertwined through the highly revered psychiatrist Pavel Kovalevskii. It is McReynolds’s chapter in particular that demonstrates how Lombrosian influences lay behind Kovalevskii’s own rise to prominence (65), while Nicolosi provides a more detailed examination into how Kovalevskii’s narrative works can be used among other classical criminal-anthropological texts such as Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov (102).⁶ This in itself provides an insight into how, while Lombroso’s own writing had been dismissed, the ideas of a number of his protégés, such as Enrico Ferri, still found a receptive audience even after the revolutionary events of 1917.⁷

The volume’s mid-section sees attention turn toward some of the more practical approaches toward social deviancy and criminality during the period of the late 1920s and early 1930s. At the forefront of this is David Shearer’s detailed examination of early Soviet policing, which particularly recalls how the shifting emphasis from asocial to anti-Soviet (131) was reflected in accompanying judicial categorization. Shearer’s work is complemented by Anne Hartmann’s chapter, which analyzes how Marxist sociology combined...