Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930 (review)

The new Soviet society that emerged after 1917 was committed, at least on paper, to the abolition of class differences, gender equality, and the transformation of individuals and groups to a new, socialist outlook and way of life. In practice, this idealistic vision was hampered not only by scarce resources and the destruction wrought by seven years of war between 1914 and 1921, but by the attitudes and approaches of professionals and ordinary citizens who consciously or unconsciously resisted transformation and the new byt’ (or everyday life). Sharon Kowalsky’s book Deviant Women examines one influential realm—the field of criminology—where the tension between tradition and transformation played out during the 1920s. Using professional publications and statistics of the 1920s, Kowalsky delves into criminologists’ discussions of female deviance, which, she demonstrates, reinforced traditional notions of gender difference and helped to reinscribe them within the ideological debates of the new order.

The book has two interconnected purposes: to trace the development of the field of Soviet criminology and to use criminologists’ writings to examine the gender dynamics of the transitional period in Russia (roughly 1917–1928). Most criminologists of the 1920s were trained during the late imperial period and became “bourgeois specialists” under the new regime, shifting from evaluating the needs and motives of tsarist subjects to considerations of the means by which the Soviet state could create “new people” and, consequently, a modern socialist society. The study of female crime, a rare issue of professional agreement, was a key indicator of the extent to which Soviet men and women were successfully making this transition. The progress of women, however, at least according to the criminologists, was limited. While female crime temporarily increased during the transitional period, the kinds of crimes that women committed remained “primitive”—that is, rural and connected to the family. Therefore, Kowalsky concludes that criminologists of the 1920s contributed to an essentialist view of women that linked their behavior to their physiology, sexuality, and role as mothers. Because of the apparently immutable characteristics of women, these specialists deemed that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for women to undergo a transformation of social consciousness and successfully engage in the “struggle for existence,” the essential task for all Soviet citizens.

In Part 1 Kowalsky skillfully details the development of the field of Russian criminology from its origins in the 1860s and 1870s to its role as one of the professional groups that helped to establish and institutionalize Soviet power in 1920s. Criminology—an interdisciplinary field comprising practitioners from law, medicine, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines—developed in Western Europe out of a general belief that the study of deviance could help improve society. By the late nineteenth century two broad schools of thought had developed. The first, based on the work of the Italian Cesare Lombroso, came out of Darwinian evolutionary theory and relied on physiological and psychological characteristics to identify the criminal tendencies inherent in specific individuals (the “born criminal”). The second took a sociological approach, analyzing the socioeconomic conditions that contributed to crime. In Russia, this latter school developed a “left wing,” inspired by radical socialist thought and led by the legal scholar M. N. Gernet, that would after 1917 form the core of Soviet criminological studies. While the Lombrosian approach was largely discredited by the early 1900s, it remained an influential, if unacknowledged, component of criminological research in Russia through the 1910s and 1920s. After the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, criminologists, Kowalsky shows, combined the sociological approach with psychological studies of individuals while establishing their professional and institutional identities within a state that sought to control all aspects of social existence. However, their theoretical approaches and strategies for establishing state institutes ultimately led to the demise of the profession by 1930, when criminologists were denounced for taking anti-Soviet, “Lombrosian” approaches to the study of crime and state centers of support were reorganized under Stalin.

Bolshevik...