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Crime and the Environment: The New Soviet Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert J. Osborn
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Extract

The Revival of criminology as a formal discipline in the Soviet Union is raising anew the old Marxist problem of the effect of the environment on the individual. For thirty years following the abolition of the OGPU's Institute for Studying Crime and the Criminal there had been no research facility devoted to studying the causes of crime. Then in 1964 the USSR Public Prosecutor's Office transformed its existing crime-detection research center into the All-Union Institute for Studying the Causes of Crime and Developing Crime-Prevention Methods (hereafter called the Institute for Crime Prevention). Because of its sponsorship it is rather likely that the Institute's senior researchers have access to at least part of the country's largely unpublished crime statistics, hence that they can speak with greater authority than Soviet crime specialists working in the universities and under the Academy of Sciences. It was also in the same year that criminology began to be offered as a subject at Moscow University Law School, and other Soviet law schools have followed suit.

In a society whose ideology asserts that the effect of the environment on the individual is largely known, the effort to isolate particular effects should be of some interest. The assumption that Soviet crime is a product of elements of the capitalist past surviving in the present is strongly reaffirmed by the Institute's director, Igor I. Karpets, and his deputy, Vladimir N. Kudriavtsev. Since by any Soviet definition of “environment” the Soviet citizen is exposed to the socialist present far more than to remnants of the prerevolutionary period, the problem of identifying the “survivals” is coupled with the problem of lack of positive response to the socialist environment by some persons. Karpets seeks these phenomena first of all in the human mind.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 1968 , pp. 395 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1968

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References

1 I. Karpets, “O prirode i prichinakh prestupnosti v SSSR,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo (hereafter abbreviated SGP), No. 4, 1966, pp. 88-89.

2 Ibid., p. 87.

3 Shliapochnikov, “O klassifikatsii obstoiatel'stv, sposobstvuiushchikh soversheniiu prestuplenii,” SGP, No. 10, 1964, p. 92.

4 A. G. Kharchev, “Eshche raz o sem'e,” Pravda, Nov. 23, 1966.

5 Karpets, pp. 87-90. The outline form here is mine. An outline almost identical with this version is used in P. P. Mikhailenko and I. A. Gel'fand, Preduprezhdenie prestupnosti— osnova bor'by za iskorenenie prestupnosti (Moscow, 1964), pp. 26-29.

6 S. S. Ostroumov and V. E. Chugunov, “Izuchenie lichnosti prestupnika po materialam kriminologicheskikh issledovanii,” SGP, No. 9, 1965, pp. 93-102.

7 Sakharov, , O lichnosti prestupnika (Moscow, 1961), pp. 45–58.Google Scholar

8 Shliapochnikov, pp. 91-100.

9 Ibid., p. 99.

10 S. Ostroumov and N. Kuznetsova, “O prichinakh i usloviiakh prestupnosti,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, Series X: Pravo, No. 4, 1965, pp. 50-51.

11 “Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia i kriminologiia,” Voprosy filosofii, No. 2, 1964, pp. 50.

12 V. V. Pankratov, “Problema prichinnosti i printsip vzaimodeistviia v kriminologii,” SGP, No. 6, 1967, pp. 123-24.

13 This appears to be the message, for example, of an otherwise rather pretentious article by Aleksandr M. Iakovlev, “Vzaimodeistvie lichnosti so sredoi kak predmet kriminologicheskogo issledovaniia,” SGP, No. 2, 1966, pp. 55-63.

14 Ostroumov and Chugunov, pp. 97-98.

15 Ibid., p. 101. 16 A number of features of the anti-parasite legislation which were objectionable to many Soviet jurists were revised or abolished in the Russian Republic in 1965 (Vedomosti Verkhovnogo soveta RSFSR, 1965, No. 38, Art. 932).

17 Ostroumov and Chugunov, p. 99.

18 A. Iakovlev, “Izuchenie lichnosti pravonarushitelei,” in Organizatsiia izucheniia prichin prestupnosti i razrabotki rner ee preduprezhdeniia v raione (Moscow, 1966), pp. 83-84.

19 “Ob izuchenii lichnosti prestupnika,” SGP, No. 11, 1962, p. 112.

20 Murray Feshback, “Manpower in the U.S.S.R.: A Survey of Recent Trends and Prospects,” in New Directions in the Soviet Economy: Studies Prepared for the Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy of the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress of the United States, Part III: Human Resources (Washington, 1966), pp. 714-15, 735-39.

21 S. Solov'ev, “Nastupaet vecher,” Izvestiia, Jan. 21, 1967, p. 3.

22 See note 7 above.

23 See the criticism of Sakharov's book in Iakovlev, A. M., Bor'ba s retsidivnoi pre-stupnosfiu (Moscow, 1964), pp. 95–100.Google Scholar

24 Vedomosti Verkhovnogo soveta RSFSR, 1967, No. 23, Art. 536.

25 Ukreplenie zahonnosti i pravoporiadka—programmnaia zadacha partii (Moscow, 1964), p. 158.

26 By tie i soznanie (Moscow, 1957), pp. 3-15, 226-54.

27 N. A. Struchkov, “O mekhanizme vzaimnogo vliianiia obstoiatel'stv obuslovlivaiushchikh sovershenie prestuplenii,” SGP, No. 10, 1966, pp. 114-15. Struchkov in this same article strongly defended the study of personality factors.

28 Sakharov, pp. 58-59.

29 Ibid., pp. 181-82.

30 Iakovlev, Bor'ba, pp. 95-100. See also L. A. Rybak's review in Voprosy psikhologii, No. 4, 1964. 31 “O nekotorykh iskhodnykh polozheniiakh izucheniia nesovershennoletnego pravonarushitelia,” in Preduprezhdenie prestupnosti nesovershcnnoletnikh (Moscow, 1965), pp. 86-87.

32 Ibid., pp. 82-83.

33 Izvestiia, Oct. 22, 1965, p. 4.

34 Izvestiia, Jan. 27, 1966, p. 4.

35 Chest’ (Moscow, 1961).

36 G. A. Medynskii, Trudnaia kniga (Moscow, 1964).

37 Ibid., pp. 207-12.

38 Ibid., pp. 2H-12, 432.

39 Medynskii, p. 535.

40 Ibid., p. 479.

41 Ibid., pp. 455-56.

42 Ibid., p. 446.

43 Interviewed by Evg. Bogat, Literaturnaia gazeta, May 13, 1965, p. 2.