ABSTRACT
This chapter looks into how the mechanism of complaints was built into the general assortment of ways to restore justice available to citizens of the USSR, how it was organized, and how it served as an institutional structure channeling a request for justice. Increasing tensions between the development of legal practices and the mechanism of complaints were tangible not only at the royal chancellery’s level. Just like in Tsarist Russia and in most socialist systems, the Soviet mechanism of complaints was set up as a structure of regulatory bodies controlling authorities. A socialist society also produced a peculiar normative base, which determined how conflicts were resolved and justice restored. The 1917 Revolution played a very special role in the development of Russian law and the judiciary. During the first years of the Soviet regime, the bureaucracy of complaints was created outside of the judiciary, although closely connected to it.
