Extra-Judicial Repression and the Courts: Their Relationship in the 1930s

In the 1930s Soviet leaders sought to change the way both the courts and extra-judicial bodies (political police) dealt with what the regime took for infringements of its order. The decade saw a series of reorganizations touching the procuracy, the courts, the People’s Commissariat of Justice, and the agencies of the secret police, as well as measures to redistribute powers among these bodies. ¹ It also witnessed new draft criminal and civil procedure codes and debates behind the scenes within the judicial establishment, in which advocates of firm legal norms seemed to take the upper hand. ² However, the impact of these debates and organizational measures on actual judicial and penal practice was limited. The discussions of the mid-1930s about constraining repression through law were followed by a whirlwind ofterror in 1937-38, and the most prominent spokesman ofthe moderate camp, Procurator General A. Ia. Vyshinskii, became closely associated with this proliferation of coercion. To be sure, in early 1936 Vyshinskii did denounce to Stalin some of the practices ofthe NKVD that had doubled the penal population in less than four years. But the growth in the number of inmates in camps, colonies, and prisons continued, exceeding 2,400,000 in January 1941. ³ Although some leaders saw a need to improve the administration of justice, it proved impossible to achieve real changes before World War II, and in fact until the mid-1950s.