ABSTRACT
Ordinary Soviet citizens had more frequent contact with the police than do citizens of democratic societies. In the west, the patrol is the heart of police work and the most frequent point of police-citizen contact. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the vast majority of citizen encounters with the police took place outside of the daily militia patrol. Law-abiding citizens in the USSR were constantly forced to consider the militia as they planned their day’s activities. Adult citizens who left their homes without their internal passports were subject to police sanction. Individuals who went on weekend car outings would invariably be stopped by the ubiquitous traffic militia. A Soviet television camera crew that attempted to film the homes of the nation’s political elite would be stopped by militia guards. Even in the Gorbachev period, people who listened to political speeches in downtown Moscow could not help but notice a massive police presence in the city center. In all these situations, the militia acted as a reminder to Soviet citizens that they did not inhabit a free society and that their personal movements and routine activities were the object of state scrutiny. The militia annually handed out administrative sanctions to approximately one-quarter of the adult population, an indication of the degree to which police controls pervaded daily life. In 1987, Soviet citizens lost 25 million work hours attending to passport requirements alone.1 Administrative sanctions in the USSR were not on a par with the parking tickets awarded to careless drivers in western societies and often involved stiff fines and/or short-term imprisonment. Sanctions could be imposed for such minor infractions as the failure to buy a local transport ticket, their consequences extending far beyond the original penalty. Militia records of citizen transgressions could, for example, cause individuals to lose their place in line for state-subsidized apartments. Defendants who faced administrative charges enjoyed even fewer legal protections than those who faced criminal charges; until 1985, they were denied the right to counsel and any right of appeal. Powerful demonstrations of the militia’s control over everyday life, administrative sanctions left citizens unable to challenge decisions that bore significant ramifications for their private lives.2
