Arson, Law and Society in Russia: Contemporary Issues and Historical Perspectives

The following report consists of two essays examining the phenomenon of arson in Russia in two periods of accelerated social change and reform: during the post-Emancipation era (1861-1905) and in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In both essays, the author examines the crime of arson as an aspect of Russia\u27s century-long struggle to establish an effective rule of law in society and in the state. During both periods under review here, Russia was without an effective rule of law. One hundred years ago, during the post-Emancipation era, arson in rural Russia was commonplace and served as a reminder of how far Russian legal reformers had to go before they could draw the peasant majority of the population into understanding of, trust in, and use of the law to mediate their relations with other members of their society. Despite sincere and serious efforts on the part of the state and of members of the legal community to bring law to the Russian countryside, arson continued to plague villages and gentry estates alike. Arson fires represented three obstacles to the development of the power of law in Russian society: as a common and frequent crime, they demonstrated general lawlessness in the countryside; as weapons of social control and retribution within the peasant community and between classes, they reflected community norms and concepts of justice that blocked the introduction of a national system of shared ethics and laws; and as unsolved crimes, they testified to the weaknesses of the system of policing, investigation, and judicial institutions. It is important to note that the second obstacle sometimes had the paradoxical effect of maintaining community stability by reenforcing community norms and ethics of behavior. While these community norms frustrated efforts to introduce a shared legal system, a genuinely national rule of law, they did not necessarily contribute to chaos or a generalized insecurity among the population. The author\u27s examination of arson in Russia beginning in the late Gorbachev era identifies two areas of continuity. First, the increase in the incidence of arson reflects the spread of lawlessness in post-Soviet Russia. As such, it is simply one of the many crimes contributing to the explosion of criminality in Russia today. Second, the breakdown in the institutions of the police, investigation, and the courts resembles the failures of these institutions in the pre-Soviet period. This breakdown has contributed to the population\u27s willingness to commit crime and to take the law into their own hands as a way to protect themselves. In this sense, post-Soviet Russians find themselves resorting to a twentieth-century form of samosud, self-help, a stage in the development of legal cultures that has always been associated with the evolution of a society toward the rule of law. and that has represented the immaturity of that legal culture. In post-Soviet Russia, self-help has resurged as the only route to self-protection in the wake of the utter collapse of institutions of law and order. The author concludes that comparing arson in the post-Soviet era with arson in the preSoviet era leads to the pessimistic conclusion that Russia today has further to go to develop a rule of law than a century ago. By examining the uses of arson and its reach into various elements of society, she concludes that arson illuminates the wholesale deterioration of shared ethical norms in the culture. Whereas communities in rural Russia a century ago displayed shared morals and constraints, even while practicing arson, urban residents of Russia today float in a population of no limits, bespredel, with no guidelines for acceptable and unacceptable behavior, much less for fundamental definitions of criminality. This report presents the essay on contemporary arson first, then provides the historical essay on arson in rural Russia a century ago

Russia’s Law ‘On Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression’: 1991-2011, An Enduring Artifact of the Dismantling of the Soviet Regime, Transitional Justice, and the Aspiration for a Rule of Law State

This is the first of two Working Papers on the twenty-year history of Russia’s Law 1761- 1, “On Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression,” which was passed in the last months of the Soviet regime by the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, and signed on October 18, 1991, by RSFSR President Boris Yeltsin. The law, amended 16 times, continues to be in force today. This paper focuses on the origins of the law. The law emerged out of the contest between Communist Party (CPSU) leaders and more progressive elements in late Soviet society and politics. I highlight here the law’s embodiment of an historical reckoning with the abuses of the Soviet era and the law’s challenge to the Soviet regime’s control over information. This Working Paper thus stresses the most positive aspects of the law’s history. The second Working Paper from this project addresses the record of the law’s implementation from the perspective of beneficiaries, their advocates, and the state personnel who administer the law. Because of fundamental changes in the language of the law and in the benefits it offered by legislative amendments in 2005, the second Working Paper records the decline in 2005-2011 of the law’s contribution to transitional justice and the rule of law during the tenure of Vladimir Putin as president of the Russian Federation

The Decline of the Russian Federation’s Commitment to Victims of Soviet Political Repression The Law ‘On Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression’ of 1991. A Twenty-Year Review of Implementation

This is the second Working Paper examining the twenty-year history of Law 1761-1, “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.”(Hereafter: LoR) First passed in October 1991 by the RSFSR Supreme Soviet before the collapse of the USSR, the law continues to be in force today. The first Working Paper focused on the law’s positive contributions to a historical reckoning with Soviet abuses of Soviet citizens. This paper focuses on the law’s function as a social welfare benefit program; amendments to the law, 1992-2011; and stakeholders’ views of its application

Denis Skopin, La photographie de groupe et la politique de la disparition dans la Russie de Staline

Denis Skopin, a philosopher in St. Petersburg, Russia, earned his doctorate in aesthetics at l’Université Paris VIII. Theoretically informed by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondin (1924‑1989), Skopin offers a meditation in La photographie de groupe on the meaning of altered photographs dating to the late 1930s, held in the archives of the St. Petersburg branch of Memorial. He focuses on two aspects of the photographic record of Stalin’s terror: photographs of groups rather than of individ..

Denis Skopin, La photographie de groupe et la politique de la disparition dans la Russie de Staline

Denis Skopin, a philosopher in St. Petersburg, Russia, earned his doctorate in aesthetics at l’Université Paris VIII. Theoretically informed by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondin (1924‑1989), Skopin offers a meditation in La photographie de groupe on the meaning of altered photographs dating to the late 1930s, held in the archives of the St. Petersburg branch of Memorial. He focuses on two aspects of the photographic record of Stalin’s terror: photographs of groups rather than of individ..

Alain Blum, Marta Craveri, Valérie Nivelon, éds., Déportés en URSS

Publications based on oral history interviews with survivors of Soviet repression display some emerging conventions. Four appear in this volume: maps to show the victims’ multiple displacements, victims’ photographs, passages taken directly from the victims’ testimony, and collaboration among the interviewers/editors and between interviewer and interviewee. The resulting history is dynamic and intimate. Blum, Craveri and Nivelon have brought the survivors’ unmediated stories to readers by inc..