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97 3 “The Flesh and Blood of Society” Young and adult criminals are born and live in the midst of society ; they are its reflection; they are “the flesh of its flesh, and the bones of its bones.” —Dmitrii A. Dril', 1895 In 1913, the psychiatrist Samuel L'vovich Tsetlin (1878–?) reported in the influential Sovremennaia psikhiatriia on the case of a young man who had killed his father. Sergei Martionov had entered his father’s room very early one morning in 1911 and stabbed the sleeping man to death with a dagger. Martionov made no effort to escape and returned to his own room in the house, where he was subsequently apprehended by the police, still in possession of the murder weapon. Tsetlin was explicit in approaching his examination of the crime “with the same methods with which one approaches the history of a disease, i.e., initially to identify the facts of the young man’s heredity, his past, and the characteristics of Martionov’s personality in the period leading up to the commission of the crime; a description of the crime and the events that followed; the facts of an examination of the accused in court; and, of course, the expert conclusions.” Tsetlin then went on to note evidence of pathological heredity in the Martionov family: Sergei’s brother manifested “acute symptoms of physical degeneration (with a misshapen skull and asymmetrical ears).” Tsetlin’s physical examination of Sergei showed that he also “had numerous physical signs of degeneration”; for example, “his skull was the wrong shape, with a sloping forehead with sharply prominent orbital ridges and acutely segmented upper parts.” This defective heredity was exacerbated by his upbringing; in particular, his father’s confused attempts to find him employment and alternative accommodation, both of which only worsened 98 | Renovating Russia his condition. A psychological examination of the young man revealed “a clearness of consciousness and the absence of any delirium,” and Martionov admitted that he had committed a crime and that it was wrong, “but his words conveyed no genuine sense of remorse or doubt.” In conclusion, Tsetlin repeated that Martionov suffered from both “physical and mental degeneration ” yet maintained that the symptoms of degeneration “were not so acute that they might not have been significantly alleviated had Martionov been exposed to more favorable conditions of education and family life.”1 In its unrelenting focus on the biopsychological characteristics of the murderer and their relationship with the forces of heredity and the environment, Tsetlin’s article was typical of a substantial body of literature that emerged at the intersection of psychiatry and jurisprudence in late Imperial Russia and usually bore the name criminal anthropology. This chapter seeks to excavate and explore the assumptions and arguments that underpinned Tsetlin’s analysis. It does not seek to offer a comprehensive survey of the history of criminology in late Imperial Russia nor even of criminal anthropology as a specific subdiscipline. Rather, it shows how the application of degeneration theory to crime constituted a way of mediating between perceptions of social decline and individual deviance in the period. Contemporaries themselves understood that criminal anthropology was inescapably a meditation on wider issues of societal health and disease. Writing in the official Zhurnal grazhdanskogo i ugolovnogo prava in 1891, criminologist Ignatii Platonovich Zakrevskii (1839–1906) argued that “the teaching [of the criminal anthropologists] is first and foremost sociological, seeking to determine, with the help of anatomy, psychiatry, history, and statistics, the origins and meaning of crime in a series of manifestations of social life. According to this school, since crime is to the social body what disease is to the human body, its teachings represent a kind of course of social pathology and therapy.”2 Criminality was a key subject of public debate in the late imperial period.3 The expansion of Russian cities and the cultural and social disorientation 1 S. L. Tsetlin, “Degenerativnaia psikhopatiia,” Sovremennaia psikhiatriia (January 1913): 37, 44. 2 Ignatii P. Zakrevskii, “Ob ucheniiakh ugolovno-antropologicheskoi shkoly,” Zhurnal grazhdanskogo i ugolovnogo prava, no. 9 (1891): 77. 3 Significant discussions of the topic include: Sergei S. Ostroumov, Prestupnost' i ee prichiny v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: MGU, 1960); Richard Sutton, “Crime and Social Change in Russia after the Great Reforms: Laws, Courts, and Criminals, 1874–1894” (PhD diss., Indiana University of Maryland, 1981); Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jörg Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Verhältnis von...

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