ABSTRACT
In the opening decade of the twentieth century, Russian scholarship in criminal law became more complex, witnessing simultaneously a polarization and overlap between schools of thought. The appearance of the new sub-discipline of criminal politics to combat crime was matched by developments in criminal law theory inspired by the revival of philosophical idealism and new liberalism. Study of crime and punishment through the lens of social economic concerns took its cue from a slightly older generation of Russian positivists, such as M.P. Chubinsky and S.K. Gogel’, who had begun publishing in the 1890s and were established scholars by the 1900s, and was taken further by a younger generation of privat-dotsenty including M.N. Gernet and S. Poznyshev whose careers bridged the October Revolution. Possibly, the most important figure to have marked this development abroad was the German scholar, Franz von Liszt (1851-1919). His work on crime as a social-psychological phenomenon, together with his endeavours to map out the theoretical territory in criminal politics, attracted many followers in Russia from the 1890s onwards.1 Thus, while research into criminal behaviour remained sensitive to social and environmental conditions, new legal positivists were careful not to exaggerate a direct causal link between climate or alcoholism and criminal proclivities. Rather, the link was mediated through factors such as ‘inherited degeneracy’. With mass poverty and ignorance now explained as the root cause of inherited disease and mental or emotional derangement, and not as the immediate reason for a criminal act, legal positivists began retracing a path back to the criminal as a person, and not unlike moral idealists, started analysing criminal behaviour as both a psychological and moral phenomenon. The upshot was that while the criminal remained a classifiable social phenomenon, he was also regarded as a moral person whose personal beliefs and moral standards were key to understanding crime.
