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165 5 Social Isolation and Coercive Treatment after the Revolution If ancient Themis only listened to the description of an offense with her eyes bound and without ever looking at the actual person of the criminal, we biologists should not only regard him with our eyes completely uncovered but should also scrutinize him with all the means of investigation available to us. —Viktor V. Brailovskii, 1927 In 1927, the criminologist G. N. Udal'tsov published a study entitled “Criminal Offenses in the Armed Forces from the Perspective of Pathological Physiology” in the authoritative Obozrenie psikhiatrii, nevrologii i refleksologii. The study related the case of a student at a technical college . Actively religious before the revolution, he had been drafted into the imperial army in 1916 and in 1920 joined the Bolshevik Party. Recently the young man, who was described as “a passive rank and file worker,” had been admitted to the clinic for mental illness at Leningrad’s MilitaryMedical Academy. Udal'tsov’s diagnosis of the student’s condition is worth citing at length: He once again became religious, avidly read the Gospels, and distributed his possessions among his acquaintances. He began to preach against human injustice , emphatically rejecting the Party’s program in particular, saying that truth could only be found in the Gospels. He spoke out against war and against all its instruments, especially the army, declaring military service to be potential participation in murder. He was arrested as a counterrevolutionary for his refusal to serve in the army and for his open dissemination of his views . . . [and] was sent to the clinic for examination. The clinical diagnosis was “dementia praecox.” Here we have an interesting case, as a result of the dissolution of 166 | Renovating Russia restraints and under the influence of a pathological process, of the reappearance of old reflexes that had been strongly instilled in childhood—religiosity and conservatism.1 Leaving to one side the issue of its clinical accuracy, which here can be neither corroborated nor refuted, Udal'tsov’s diagnosis is striking for its characterization of the subject’s condition in terms of a failure to adapt to the ideological demands of postrevolutionary society. The student’s exposure to a religious and conservative milieu under the ancien régime had instilled in him psychological reflexes or “social instincts,” as they were often termed, which resulted in deviant and subversive behavior in the socialist state. Udal'tsov explained this failure of individual adaptation to a changing environment as a consequence of biopsychological deficiencies: As a result of phylogenesis, man receives a range of hereditary features, instincts, and unconditional reflexes, on the basis of which he constructs a conditionalreflexive system over the course of his life. A healthy [polnotsennyi—literally, “full value”] individual is characterized by a swift and complete adaptation to the surrounding milieu, based on the regulatory work of the higher nervous system. Individuals with an “an easily-excitable and functionally unstable cortex” would, however, experience “an acute struggle between excitement and restraint that . . . in individuals with weak nervous systems would result in a disturbance in the cortical balance, an explosion in its cortical activity, and a neurotic condition.”2 The language of psychopathology was here integrated into a revolutionary narrative of societal change and individual adaptation. The persistence of a prerevolutionary system of beliefs and values into the Soviet Union of the 1920s resulted in behavior that could be diagnosed as mentally ill, “socially dangerous,” and even counterrevolutionary. It was in the wake of 1917 that criminology emerged as a distinct discipline within the human sciences with institutional grounding and regime funding.3 The first criminological research center was founded in Petrograd in 1918. Adoption of the 1922 criminal code laid the foundation for extensive criminological research by recognizing the existence of criminality in Soviet society. As Louise Shelly has shown, criminologists of this period 1 G. N. Udal'tsov, “Pravonarusheniia v voiskakh s tochki zreniia patologicheskoi fiziologii,” Obozrenie psikhiatrii, nevrologii i refleksologii, no. 2 (1927): 121. 2 Ibid., 124. 3 On the history of Soviet criminology, see Peter H. Solomon Jr., “Soviet Penal Policy, 1917–1934: A Reinterpretation,” Slavic Review 39, no. 2 (June 1980): 195–217; idem, “Soviet Criminology: Its Demise and Rebirth, 1928–1965,” Soviet Union 1, no. 2 (1974): 122–40; Louise Shelly, “Soviet Criminology after the Revolution,” Journal of Law and Criminology 70, no. 3 (1979): 391–405; Aleksandr B. Sakharov, Istoriia kriminologicheskoi nauki (Moscow: MVShM, 1994). [18.220.140.5] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 21...

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