My 1960s are as fluid as the 1930s, devoted to Stalinism, were; and will lead us via selected topics to the end of the regime. Having displayed considerable vitality in many spheres, from the early 1970s the Soviet Union entered into a downswing, before sinking definitively into ‘stagnation’ (zastoi). Leadership personalities are a good indicator of the system’s variable health: Khrushchev and Andropov personified a certain dynamism, whereas Brezhnev and Chernenko epitomized decline. Such curves on the historical graph were nothing new in themselves. From the outset, the historical dynamic of the Soviet Union fluctuated. In this instance, however, we are dealing with the final phase of a descending curve that was novel and ominous – though not lacking in intriguing aspects.
This prompts us to reiterate what should by now be obvious: the Russia that went to war in 1941 and emerged victorious in 1945 was still only on the way to becoming an urbanized industrial power. Sociologically and, in many respects, culturally, it was still mired in its rural past – even when it came to the characteristic features of its modernizing state. ‘Primitive’ is the adjective that comes to mind to encapsulate the postwar period and Stalin’s last years. All efforts were focused on two objectives: restoring prewar living standards and reconstructing a semblance of the Soviet system in the vast territories that had been occupied by the Germans.
The chaos that initially reigned over reconstruction is ineffable. Thousands of officials were dispatched to the reconquered territories, but were often unqualified for the task that awaited them. Of the thousands of others recruited locally, many were ex-collaborators. The regime faced numerous foes: in the Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, guerrilla units engaged the Red Army in pitched battles. Reconstruction of the system and suppression of the unrest took time and involved heavy casualties. Economic revival was launched and energetically pursued. But although recovery to prewar (1940) levels had been achieved in many spheres by 1953, this was not yet true of consumer goods. As far as food supplies were concerned, the USSR of 1945–53 remained a country whose population went hungry, or at any rate was very poorly fed.
The particular point we would like to emphasize here is this: reconstruction, however impressive in some spheres – beginning with arms production, and especially atomic weapons – coincided with the restoration of Stalinism, which was a degenerating, profoundly dysfunctional system. This included a return to wanton terror – the ageing dictator’s main political instrument – and the promulgation of a retrograde nationalist ‘great power’ ideology. Openly adopted by the dictator during the war, it was now ‘perfected’ in the autocratic mould of imperial Russia.
The regime was the personal dictatorship of a man whose titles stopped just short of rivalling the Tsars’, and who imposed a replica of Peter the Great’s ‘table of ranks and uniforms’ on the senior bureaucracy. The reference to ‘Great and Holy Russia’ in the Union’s national anthem, as the crowning symbol of the state and its ideology, rounded off this new–old rhetorical format. As for popular compliance, it was ensured by terror. Nothing is more characteristic of this aspect of the ‘restoration’, seemingly quite successful, than the figures for the Gulag. Having declined to 800,000 during the war, the number of inmates exceeded 3 million by 1953. And when we add the figures for those exiled and imprisoned, we arrive at a total of 5 million people – an all-time record. In the same year, however, the numbers did begin to fall again. Meanwhile, no policy switch of any significance can be identified. Stalin carried on plotting changes of personnel and none of the leadership knew where (or how) they would end up; Molotov and Mikoyan were convinced that they were going to be liquidated. Endless appointments and reorganizations – a replay of the constant ministerial musical chairs in Tsarism’s dying days – are indicative of the confusion that prevailed at the top. In short, it cannot be said that the USSR was really governed in these years.
When Stalin was struck down by serious illness, Politburo members took turns at his bedside (or perhaps in an adjoining room). Once it was apparent that his condition was terminal, they turned to political matters. Most of them were already nurturing schemes and began manoeuvring for positions and allies. Whatever the outcome of these shifting combinations, the new rulers were inheriting a regime that belonged to a different – past – age. Changes began almost at once, and initially isolated measures soon gave way to successive waves of reform.
We shall discuss these reforms below. But for now it is important to appreciate that Stalin’s disappearance opened various valves in the system, making it possible to form a leadership group capable of reviving the regime. Those at the top can all be characterized as ‘Stalinists’, so it is scarcely surprising that one of their first steps was the classically Stalinist deed of eliminating one of their number – Beria – as well as a significant number of secret police officials, who were shot or imprisoned on the basis of a tissue of hastily concocted, incoherent charges.
This affair is in part explained by the sequence of events. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. The same day, a session of the Central Committee plenum, the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decreed that the MGB (Ministry of State Security) and the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) should once again be fused into one MVD, to be headed by Beria, who was also appointed Deputy Prime Minister. These decisions were made official by the Supreme Soviet on 15 March. That day, the Council of Ministers appointed people close to Beria and Malenkov to various posts: Kruglov, Kobulov and Serov became Beria’s first deputies, Maslennikov was made MVD deputy minister, and all of them were named members of the MVD collegium (an internal consultative council present in every ministry). The precise whys and wherefores of these appointments remain obscure. But the fact is that Beria, under the auspices of his putative ally, Prime Minister Malenkov, retained a key role in government and kept a grip on the whole repressive apparatus and its military formations, totalling more than a million people.
Something in this rapid sequence must have alarmed Khrushchev. It is not clear to me how he managed to persuade Malenkov to dump his associate, but Beria was arrested on 26 June 1953 during a Politburo meeting and arrests of other MVD officials followed. It was decided to dismantle the ministry’s industrial structures, and its extra-judicial ‘special concilium’ was abolished on 1 September. Further changes ensued.
However, the real story of Beria and co.’s misdeeds was not made public. Moreover, no one would have believed it. Instead, citizens were served up a classically Stalinist concoction. There is no way of knowing whether Beria really intended to eliminate all or some of his colleagues. Moreover, most – even all – of the leaders in post had signed or consigned orders for the execution of innocent people and thus risked being implicated. A single top leader – unquestionably a dangerous one – and some lesser figures thus paid for the crimes of all the other Stalinists, who had not yet stated what they thought about the whole bloody past. One fact nevertheless stands out: the nightmarish ‘investigations’, the fake accusations, and the trials currently in progress – notably the notorious ‘doctors’ plot’ – were halted overnight. The victims were fully rehabilitated and the doctors returned to their positions in the Kremlin. Further rehabilitations and releases soon began, with less fanfare.
This was a clear signal that something significant was afoot. Il’ia Ehrenburg was to refer to these changes as ‘the thaw’ in a novel of that title, even though the leadership still contained figures who would remain faithful to Stalin, and utterly unrepentant about the past, for the rest of their lives. When, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev launched his sensational attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, Soviet society, and especially the intelligentsia, understood that the days of Stalinist show trials and arbitrary arrests and executions had gone for good. Yet the thaw was not initiated by that congress: its participants were as surprised as everyone else and the many Stalinists among them were in a state of shock. No one had anticipated such a bombshell – and so soon. The Stalinist riposte came a year later: assured of a majority in the Presidium, they attempted a palace coup against Khrushchev. But it was thwarted by an alliance between the military and a majority of Central Committee members; Khrushchev remained in power and consolidated his position. What happened next was unheard of: no death sentences – no prison sentences even – were pronounced against the plotters. They were simply relieved of their positions. One of them – Voroshilov – was even pardoned and retained a ceremonial post.
All this – and more that we have not mentioned – was quite unprecedented and remained the rule in the political class under Khrushchev and after his removal. Another decisive change occurred, which for the most part historians have not stressed sufficiently: imprisonment of countless people accused of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ ceased. The notion even disappeared from the criminal code, to be replaced by ‘crimes against the state’, directed at oppositional activities. Political opposition continued to be repressed, but (as we shall see) the repression was henceforth on a quite different scale and less brutal. Now – and this was not insignificant – the accused actually had to do something before being charged. Those who suffered repression certainly paid a heavy price, and comparisons with the past were small consolation, yet the fact remains that the changes in penal policy were meaningful. To engage in protest was no longer a suicidal step; people survived their sentences. Some public and confidential channels existed for protesting against the arbitrary use of power.
We can now turn to a survey of deeper systemic changes. These were ushered in by government policy, but also created by spontaneous transformations in Soviet reality. They concern the triad of social ‘militarization–criminalization–mobilization’ characteristic of the Stalinist regime.
Under the broad heading of changes in the prison system, we must mention the dismantling of a core component of the previous regime: the Gulag – a system of forced labour that we described above as being in an advanced state of decay. It lasted for twenty years. Yet many speak as if it had always existed, while others fail to register its disappearance. The reform began in earnest from 1954 onwards, although some key structures had been abolished the year before. Of crucial importance was the dismantling, already noted, of the MVD’s economic—industrial complex, which was the essential element in the Gulag’s forced-labour empire. With the transfer to civilian ministries of most of its industrial agencies (road and rail construction, forestry, mining, etc.), this sinister repressive complex, deeply interested in a constant supply of unpaid labour, was significantly reduced. The labour force no longer consisted in slaves, but in paid workers enjoying the protections afforded by the labour code, which was substantially amended at the same time. With this large-scale ‘expropriation’ of the MVD went a step-by-step transformation of the whole Gulag structure into a reformed prison system with a new name, followed by a reduction in the number of inmates in the camps (now called ‘colonies’, ‘prisons’ and ‘deportee settlements’). The number of detainees in these various institutions (excluding prisons) fell from 5,223,000 on 1 January 1953 to 997,000 on 1 January 1959; the figure for ‘counter-revolutionaries’ dropped from 580,000 to 11,000. From the early 1960s onwards, arbitrary persecution ceased to be widespread.
These reforms did not proceed smoothly, but public pressure to accelerate ‘normalization’ was supported by the Interior Minister and the office of the Prosecutor General. The latter were highly critical of the practices of the MVD’s prisons directorate and pressured it to implement party and state decisions concerning the penal system. Two reports, separated by four years, are highly instructive in this regard. The first, dating from 1957, was written by the Interior Minister Dudorov (it was his second year in post) and concerned ‘The Problem of the Camps and New Penal Policies’. The second was by the deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR, Mishutin, reporting in 1961. We shall begin with the latter, since it contains a survey of the steps taken between 1953 and 1956.1
Mishutin’s main points were as follows. Until 1953, camp administrations did not bother about the ‘correction and re-education’ of prisoners. The prison population was predominantly regarded as manpower; and the MVD thus neglected what should have been its main duty. For years, legislation on penal policy was virtually non-existent. Access to penal institutions by representatives of society was barred and oversight of their functioning by prosecutors limited. On 10 July 1954, the Central Committee had adopted a resolution seeking to improve the situation in the MVD’s camps and colonies. The MVD was criticized for concentrating exclusively on economic output, when its main task was to engage inmates in productive labour and thereby prepare them for their reintegration into society. On 24 May 1955, the Central Committee, followed shortly afterwards by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, promulgated a ‘statute on prosecutorial supervision’ in the USSR, chapter five of which dealt with the supervision of detention centres. Henceforth camp prosecutors had to refer to the territorial offices of the Prosecutor’s Office, rather than directly to the Prosecutor General. This measure in itself was an improvement. But the situation in the camps remained unsatisfactory. On 25 October 1956, a joint decree of the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee was issued listing ‘measures to improve the work of the MVD of the USSR’ and its republican equivalents, which were accused of neglecting their reeducation duties – the evidence for this was the number of re-offenders. The government now speeded up measures to reduce and abolish the system of corrective labour camps (ispravitel’ no-trudovye lageria – ITLs), and to create supervisory bodies in conjunction with the executive committees of local soviets to oversee what occurred in what were now to be called ‘colonies’.
Minutes of a session of the MVD Collegium from early 1957, under the chairmanship of Dudorov (former party apparatchik), give us some idea of the situation. Appointed to head the MVD by the party in order to improve its functioning, Dudorov was not at all content with the camps and colonies directorate in his own ministry, particularly when it came to the re-education and utilization of prison manpower.2 Some 6 per cent of prisoners were not working because there were no jobs for them; and for those who were employed, the remuneration system was complete chaos. In 1956 the MVD had devoted much of its energy to dealing with police matters, and the minister hoped that 1957 would be the year when it would finally succeed in resolving the outstanding problems in the prison system, as required by the Central Committee. He continued:
You know that the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers have decided to move from a system of camps to a system of colonies. Colonies do a much better job, but there is still work to be done on this system. At the moment, 35 per cent of prisoners are in colonies, while the rest are in camps where they work on a contractual basis with various economic agencies. The task before us is to transfer all prisoners to colonies. Over the next 4–5 years, that involves building some 370 colonies. All production work should be done by prisoners inside their place of confinement. [That, and a normalized pay system, was supposed to be the main difference between a colony and a camp. – ML] The 66 colonies already in existence are yielding good results as regards re-education – the key objective of incarceration – and labour is the main method.
In passing, the minister observed that ‘colonies produce consumer goods (clothing, furniture, household utensils, some agricultural machinery). Thus, the zeks earn some money for themselves and their families.’
Dudorov was painting a rather rosy picture. Experience suggested (as he himself noted) that prisoners should not be paid in cash, because many of them tended to lose the money playing cards or being robbed by other prisoners. Some of the zeks themselves preferred payment in kind. Dudorov ended his report by stating that the directorate and collegium of the ministry hoped to resolve this problem in the course of 1957 (in the event, establishing the colonies was to take several more years).
Returning now to Mishutin’s 1961 text, we learn that the initial liberalization had gone too far; that it was creating malfunctions in the system; and that adjustments were required (something we already gleaned from Dudorov’s recommendation not to give prisoners too much money).
Local authorities were charged with finding employment for those being released. On 8 December 1957 the government approved a decree jointly drawn up by the Prosecutor’s Office and the MVD on the ‘correctional labour colonies and prisons of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’. The text required strict separation between different categories of prisoners, so as not to mix hardened criminals with first-time offenders. It ordered revision of procedures for early release based on a calculation of working days and sharply reduced the number of prisoners who were allowed to leave colony confines unescorted. It introduced non-cash payment, as well as other measures.
From 1953 onwards, the number of prisoners decreased regularly. Between 1953 and 1957, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet announced several amnesties for different categories of prisoner – among them, one in 1955 for people who had collaborated with the German occupier. In 1957, the fortieth anniversary of the October revolution saw a new amnesty affecting a significant number of inmates. In 1956 and 1959, commissions were set up in the republics to review directly in prison establishments the cases of those convicted of crimes against the state, malfeasance and other economic crimes, as well as minor offences. The Prosecutor General of the USSR helped to draw up these measures and oversaw their implementation.
By January 1961, the prison population had declined significantly and its composition by category of crime had changed. In 1953, 10.7 per cent of prisoners were sentenced for organized crime, robbery, premeditated murder, and rape; in 1961 the corresponding figure was 31.5 per cent. This meant that a substantial percentage of prisoners was now composed of common-law offenders, with a hard core of recidivists and dangerous criminals. This is why the colonies and prisons statute issued on 8 December 1958 now seemed inadequate: it was insufficiently severe on dangerous recidivists and the fight against crime was suffering in consequence. So on 5 November 1959 the Central Committee enjoined the Prosecutor General’s Office to step up the fight against such criminals and ensure an appropriate prison regime for them.
Two years later, the government was still not satisfied with the situation. On 3 April 1961 a new decree by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers ordered the internal affairs ministries of the republics to do more for the prison systems they were responsible for, to analyse the condition of each institution carefully, and to reinforce the separation between different categories of criminal. It also abolished the liberal system of early release for a good work record. As our documents indicate, these and other measures had been under discussion for almost five years, but had not always been implemented. Liberal and conservative politicians and jurists had sparred over every point, and there were many. Another important measure was the creation on 27 February 1959 of the collegium of the Prosecutor General and republican equivalents, followed by numerous tours of inspection and training sessions by leading functionaries from the USSR Prosecutor’s Office, with a view to reinforcing the fight against crime and improving prison administration.
We shall say no more about the way in which different government bodies tackled these issues. Specialist monographs would be required to tell the story in precise detail. But we can draw a few provisional conclusions. The Stalinist system of hard unpaid slave labour by prisoners – most of them convicted of common-law offences, but many of them ‘counter-revolutionaries’ who had committed no crime – was now a thing of the past. The same applies to mass exile settlements where more than 2 million people served sentences, often for life: in 1960, these were almost entirely emptied of inmates and such sentences were largely discontinued.3 On the other hand, normalization of the prison and penal complex was not straightforward in a system that had inherited a strong inclination to punish without concerning itself unduly with proof of guilt. If that system had nothing to do with justice, the 1960s saw an attempt to create a proper justice system. This is what clearly emerges if we turn to the intensive drafting and redrafting of the criminal and prison codes by penal institutions and the government bodies responsible for them. The discussions and pressures for further change that began immediately after the war developed with Khrushchev’s arrival in power, and continued almost to the very end of the Soviet system. A rapid survey of the legislation in force in 1984 provides a picture of the juridical principles that governed the treatment of offenders down to 1991.
In particular, we shall examine penal policy and ‘prison labour law’ as set out in the relevant codes and commentaries on them. This is a rather onerous exercise, but since the discovery of Hammurabi’s code historians have known how instructive legal texts can be – even if they are not always followed. The changes introduced by these codes should not be underestimated.4 This particularly applies to the right now enjoyed by prisoners to meet with their lawyers, without time limits and with no guards present. This formed part of a broader definition of prisoners’ rights, based on a premise to which the codes and jurisprudence devoted much space – namely, that imprisonment does not entail loss of the status of citizen and hence of citizens’ rights. Punishment restricts such rights, of course, but prisoners continue to belong to the community of citizens. The restrictions were serious: a prisoner’s wife could divorce him without waiting for his release, prisoners did not have the right to vote, they could not freely dispose of their own money, and so on. But they enjoyed the basic right to criticize and launch complaints against the prison administration. They could do so directly, in a letter to the administration, which was obliged to respond. They could also appeal to other instances (party and state) via the prison administration. The latter would probably seek to persuade the prisoner not to proceed with a complaint, but if he insisted the administration was obliged to submit it. Should it fail to do so, he could disclose the matter to visiting family or friends. The prison administration was not entitled to open prisoners’ letters to prosecutors and had to forward them within twenty-four hours.
As pointed out, an important advance was the prisoner’s right to see a lawyer with no time limit. Another source indicates that lawyers’ visits to prisoners came under the section on ‘visiting rights’.5 But they were regulated by the ‘correctional labour codes’ of the republics, not by the All-Union code. Unless these codes specified otherwise, meetings with a lawyer were to be authorized following a written request by the prisoner, a member of his family, or a representative of a public organization. They were to be conducted outside working hours and the lawyer must be duly accredited. If so requested by prisoner or lawyer, the meeting was to be held in private. (I must confess that discovering these legal provisions in the texts of the late 1970s and early 1980s came as a surprise.)
There is plentiful evidence from prosecutors, courts and local bodies of the large number of complaints from prisoners received by the Ministry of Internal Affairs itself, government supervisory agencies (central and local), regional bodies and public organizations. They were more or less carefully investigated, or passed on to more competent authorities.6 Legal power to monitor respect for the law inside places of confinement was granted to a number of bodies, of which the most powerful were the Prosecutor’s Office and state control agencies (whatever their current title). The MVD also had an internal general inspectorate, equipped with real power and able to conduct detailed inquiries. It was quite legitimately suspected of bias, given that the prison system came within its ministry’s domain. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that senior ministerial officials were well informed of the situation.
The control exercised by the higher courts over compliance with the law in the justice system had an influence on the bodies in charge of penal institutions. Such courts handled cases of violations by prison administrations and appeals, as well as cases requiring adjudication of the appropriateness of a sentence. Their activity certainly had an impact on the lot of prisoners and the atmosphere of the prison system in general. The right of social bodies to take an interest in the fate of prisoners had a similar effect, because it now formed one of a set of rights and possibilities of redress.
Political prisoners, including the better-known dissidents, were not entirely denied access to judicial review or channels for complaints. Protests by scientists and other members of the intelligentsia, addressed directly to the Central Committee or other high instances, or transmitted by confidential channels, are well documented. Some of them could be quite effective. International pressure also had an impact, prompting the authorities to prefer stripping dissidents of their nationality and exiling them abroad to keeping them in prison. We shall return to this subject.
The concern on the part of the authorities and judges not to have minor offenders mix with dangerous criminals – a principle adopted by democratic systems – led to the creation of institutions for different categories of prisoner with corresponding regimes. People serving a first sentence were separated from recidivists in all categories. There were separate institutions for women and minors. Finally, high-security complexes, isolated from the rest of the system, held those who had been convicted of ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’, ‘particularly dangerous recidivists’, and prisoners condemned to death but whose sentence had been commuted by a pardon or amnesty. Foreigners and stateless persons were also confined in separate prison establishments. Republics had the right to demand the separation of other categories as well. In contrast, none of these distinctions applied in prison hospitals, whose regulations were determined by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in consultation with prosecutors.
In total, the system had four categories of corrective labour colonies, differentiated by their internal regime: general, ‘enhanced’, ‘strict’, and ‘special’ regimes. Added to this were the various categories of ‘settlement colonies’. The ‘strict’ regime was intended for those convicted of ‘particularly dangerous crimes against the state’ and persons who had already served one sentence; while the ‘special’ regime applied to multiple offenders and women who had had their death sentence commuted. The ‘settlement colonies’ were for inmates well on the road to rehabilitation who had been transferred from other categories of colony.
Prisons comprised a sixth category, receiving those who had committed heinous crimes; especially dangerous recidivists were also sent to a prison if the court so specified. They also contained inmates transferred from colonies as a punishment for bad behaviour, as well as prisoners doing service work there instead of being sent to colonies. Prisons had two regimes: ‘general’ and ‘strict’. A prisoner could not be subject to the latter for more than six months. Women who were pregnant, or accompanied by young children, were exempt from it. In the general regime, prisoners occupied collective cells, although if the prison governor so decided they could, with the prosecutor’s consent, be transferred to individual cells. They were allowed one hour’s exercise a day (30 minutes in the special regime). Those who served their prison sentence as auxiliary staff could keep their money, receive short-term visits and packages (as per the norms of the general regime), and buy food.
Two regimes were in force in corrective labour colonies for adolescents, which formed another important sector: ‘general’ and ‘enhanced’ – the latter for very serious crimes.
Finally, in the settlement colonies, where there was supervision but no guards, inmates could move freely from the time they awoke until bedtime. If their work or studies so required, this freedom extended to the confines of the administrative region. Inmates were allowed to wear civilian clothes, carry money and use it as they wished, and keep valuables. With administrative authorization, they could live with their family in the colony; they could acquire a house and cultivate a private plot. Once married, men and women could live together in the same colony, regardless of where they had separately served the first part of their sentences.
All able-bodied inmates were obliged to perform work in accordance with their physical abilities and, so far as was possible, their professional skills. The work was primarily done in enterprises located within the colony. Inmates might work for other agencies as well, but it was up to the MVD to organize its own workshops and factories. Economic agencies were obliged to help correctional institutions realize this objective.
In principle, the ‘special’ regime required inmates to do hard labour. In reality, they were given the available jobs in branches of the surrounding economy, which meant that the labour was not necessarily ‘hard’. The physically handicapped had a lighter workload. Given that the professed objective was correction and re-education, the work was not supposed to entail physical suffering. Excessive toil would have contradicted the principle that work was not a punishment. It was up to a medical commission to assess each inmate’s physical abilities, taking account of state of health, previous work experience, and so on. Work in the inmate’s speciality could be refused only if the court’s sentence expressly forbade it. The aim was for everyone to perform profitable labour and to keep work in the colony’s internal services to a minimum.
We should indicate at this point that the issue of ‘hard labour’ under the ‘special’ regime was much debated. One senses from their reservations, which we have set out, that jurists were uncomfortable about it. When not seeking – indirectly – to challenge the very idea of ‘hard labour’, they attempted to water it down in one way or another. After all, these texts were studied in the law faculties where jurists were being trained. The latter certainly asked questions in the 1980s, or even earlier.
The vagueness of the category of ‘hard labour’ increases still further when we read the relevant paragraphs about feeding prisoners. Those subject to the special regime were entitled only to smaller, less varied rations. The suspicion arises that such prisoners were being punished by eventual starvation. The undernourishment of prisoners condemned to hard labour (or the mere power to inflict such punishment) was something that jurists commenting on the codes were vague about. However heinous their crimes (these were the most dangerous criminals), it left room for abuse. In contrast, pregnant women and sick people were entitled to better food. More generally, women (especially if they had young children), adolescents, and invalids were supposed to have special attention and better conditions. This prescription was probably followed: the death of a baby would inevitably have entailed an investigation.
All prisoners worked an eight-hour day, except on Sundays and public holidays. But they were not entitled to a vacation and their years in prison were not taken into account when it came to calculating pension entitlements. Otherwise, health and safety rules and other provisions of labour law did apply to the colonies. People who became disabled during their confinement were entitled to a pension and compensation after their release. Prisoners’ work was paid in line with civilian norms, minus the cost of upkeep (food, clothing) and, where stipulated, deductions ordered by the courts.
The research of W. I. Butler, a Western specialist on Soviet law, provides further information and some chronological clarification.7 It was on 26 June 1963 that Soviet republics established the additional penal institutions known as ‘settlement colonies’, intended for prisoners who had displayed evidence of their aptitude for reintegration into society. On 3 June 1968 a statute on labour colonies for minors was enacted. Even though the texts were not published, such legislative measures helped shape the general development of penal institutions – in these instances, in the direction of reducing unnecessary severity in sentencing. Jurists exercised significant influence.8 Among them we can identify a consistent school of thought that sought to push things in a positive direction, but which obviously needed support from above.
The MVD of the USSR determined the procedure for assigning convicted persons to one or other of the penal institutions or, in consultation with the Prosecutor’s Office, to psychiatric institutions. Medical care in prisons and colonies was jointly regulated by the MVD and the Health Ministry. In 1977, ‘Rules for Internal Order in Corrective Labour Institutions’, valid for the whole USSR, were adopted by the MVD. Other rules defining the regime of a place of confinement could be issued by the USSR’s Council of Ministers or that of the relevant republic, as well as by the Minister of Internal Affairs and his deputies. But Soviet jurists publicly warned against granting prerogatives to heads of internal affairs departments at intermediate levels or the directors of the institutions themselves. Their approach was a realistic one, but they would probably have also liked to reduce the MVD’s prerogatives in determining prison regimes, because (or this is my hypothesis) many penal institutions were located far from Moscow and their administrations contained supporters of harsh methods. These jurists knew their country’s history and the kind of people who worked in its law-and-order agencies.
Some of the principles professed by Soviet jurists under the banner of ‘socialist humanism’ did not aim only to guide interpretation of the law. While pressing for the law to be implemented to protect society from criminals, they also sought to promote a multi-faceted policy of reform, re-education and resocialization of prisoners, with a view to reintegrating them into society. Combining punishment with labour – a key part of their credo – was the best way of enabling a prisoner to return to normal life. Respecting human dignity, remitting sentences for good behaviour, combining coercion and persuasion, differentiating between punishments by separating categories of prisoner, and adjusting the severity of sentences to the gravity of the crime – these were principles they constantly invoked and fought for. Of the six categories of prison regime that we have listed, the two strictest involved only a relatively small number of inmates (unfortunately, precise figures are unavailable). Jurists also promoted the principle of ‘individualization’ – that is to say, adapting punishment and re-education to the personality of each prisoner, on the basis that everyone could be reformed.
It would certainly be reasonable to suppose that these ‘principles’ were unacceptable to conservatives of all hues, and even to some liberal-minded people who did not believe that prison warders or administrations could educate anyone and who were fearful that such measures might have negative consequences.
Other issues debated by specialists cannot be broached here. But one point that we have already discussed merits renewed emphasis: the basic premise that a prisoner remained a citizen. In itself, this challenged the deeply rooted Soviet tendency to repression. The very category of ‘enemy of the people’, and the special treatment meted out to those who fell under it, was implicitly – and often explicitly – condemned in numerous texts from the 1960s onwards. The provisions under which people were pursued for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ or as an ‘enemy of the people’ were removed from the criminal code, and the expressions disappeared from the terminology of law-enforcement. In 1961 they were replaced in the code by six paragraphs dealing with ‘the most dangerous crimes against the state’, which formed the basis for subsequent persecution of political opponents – unlike the furies of Stalinism, without providing for the death sentence. Several such crimes were punished by deprivation of Soviet citizenship and expulsion from the USSR (which was not in itself an atrocity). Guilt had to be defined in accordance with the Soviet codes. Sheer arbitrariness thus ceased to be the rule. But the very fact of pursuing political opponents, even citizens who were simply expressing criticism, was an embarrassment for the Soviet government, internationally and internally.
It is not easy to ascertain whether the letter and spirit of the legislation we have evoked were observed in practice. I have not come across a reliable monograph on the post-Stalinist prison system, except as regards the conditions of detention of political prisoners, particularly ‘dissidents’. The latter were invariably held in high-security colonies in Mordovia and the Urals, and subject to the ‘special’ regime. Conditions were very strict and relations between prisoners – some of whom were combative and unyielding – and a brutal prison administration helped make camp life particularly harsh. Comprehensive research would be required to know the true state of these camps: their number, the sentences served, casualties, and so on. We have some information courtesy of Amnesty International,9 and many of the rights that we have cited from juridical sources are not mentioned in it. Amnesty International refers to the limitations placed on the presence of lawyers during investigations (which we knew about), but says nothing about access to lawyers once convicted persons were serving their sentences. We can surmise that, having been convicted of an ‘especially dangerous crime against the state’ and confined to high-security prisons with the strictest regime, political detainees had fewer rights than other inmates. For example, whereas a generally respected legal provision allowed most prisoners to be held in the region where their family lived, legal texts provided for the converse in the case of dissidents. In the absence of proof to the contrary, there is no reason to suppose that they were regarded as citizens with inalienable rights.
The situation of the broad prison population improved appreciably, but without additional information there is no way of knowing to what extent the reality corresponded to the new legislation. Because of the dispersal of the colonies over vast territories, the poor level of training of prison administrators, and the brutal habits of MVD prison staff – not to mention the obvious difficulty of handling hardened criminals – it is likely that actual conditions must have departed from legal provisions to varying degrees.
Even so, the existence of codes and powerful institutions responsible for enforcing them, public opinion, and prisoners’ considerable experience in working the system and using the relevant provisions to their advantage, make it reasonable to assume that the reforms created a system quite distinct from that in force under Stalin, including for political prisoners – a subject we shall return to. At all events, this is the conclusion pointed to by the enormous quantity of material we possess, whether the complaints, appeals to prosecutors and judges, and demands for reviews from prisoners or their families reaching party and state authorities; or the various investigative committees (whose documents are sometimes available to Western observers). Appeals procedures, and the intervention of prosecutors or higher courts exercising their powers to review the decisions of lower courts, were important correctives in legal procedures and improved the lot of prisoners.
Another significant development, bound up with the rationalizing (should we say modernizing?) trend in penal policy, was the strong pressure from legal circles and their political allies to moderate the system’s punitive bent still further, which – or so many argued – solved nothing and simply created new problems. W. I. Butler has studied the growing pressure for the application of types of sentence which, however harsh, were non-custodial. Thus he has analysed a whole range of ‘conditional sentences’, the harshest consisting in exile from a given place or banishment to some remote location. Others took the form of mandatory labour (convicted persons continued to work as before, but with a deduction equivalent to a large fine from their wages); aiding ex-prisoners with their reintegration; and sentences without mandatory labour (introduced into the legislation of the USSR and the republic by a decree of 15 March 1983 that regulated the status of such sentences, their supervision by prosecutors, and their execution). In addition to the fines that we have already mentioned, this type of penalty included proscription from holding certain posts or engaging in specified activities, confiscation of property, the loss of a military rank or a title, and public cautions in the workplace. Reforms in criminal justice in the 1970s and the early 1980s indicate that this was a growing trend, and non-custodial sentences became increasingly widespread among the judiciary.
It should be remembered that the number of political prisoners and dangerous criminals confined in prisons, or the two categories of colony with the strictest regimes, was relatively small. The great majority of prisoners served their sentences in the ‘milder’ categories, and this was the target population for the experiments defended among the higher judiciary, jurists and some government circles. The aim was a large-scale ‘de-penalization’ of a system traditionally inclined to impose predominantly custodial sentences. The fight to liberalize sentences had begun much earlier, in the immediate post-Stalin years or even before. But it became a serious – and largely successful – struggle in the early 1980s. The phrase ‘in search of de-penalization’, used by Todd Fogleson (from whom I derive this information),10 perfectly encapsulates this period.
Data from the Russian Federation’s Justice Ministry indicate that in 1980 roughly 94 per cent of defendants in criminal cases were found guilty, and nearly 60 per cent of them were imprisoned. In 1990 these numbers fell to 84 per cent and 40 per cent respectively. According to Fogleson, shifts of this magnitude are rare; and it is difficult to explain the phenomenon exclusively on the basis of the published material and interviews (the criminal justice archives for the late 1970s and early 1980s remain inaccessible). But he later surmises, not without reason, that labour shortages might have had something to do with it – a point we shall return to.
For now, we shall attend to an important discovery by Fogleson relating to the political sphere. In the past, judges had been supervised by party officials and justice ministries, whereas the higher courts essentially exercised their powers of judicial oversight. In the 1970s, the campaign to liberalize criminal justice was not led by the party, which had relinquished interference in this domain. The Justice Ministry was not a driving force either. It was the upper tier of the court system – i.e. the Supreme Court of the USSR and its republican equivalents – that took the initiative in pressing lower courts to ‘de-penalize’ their verdicts and make greater use of non-custodial sentences. To achieve this, it used its appellate or oversight powers, issuing criticisms and organizing training seminars for judges.
The first significant changes occurred in February and March 1977, when the Supreme Soviet ‘decriminalized’ a whole range of minor offences, which were henceforth punished by simple fines or two weeks’ imprisonment (the minimum sentence had hitherto been one year). In cases they did not regard as ‘socially dangerous’, judges could now hand down suspended sentences, as well as penalties of mandatory labour for sentences of less than three years. In 1978 the Supreme Soviet broadened the categories of offences to which fines and non-custodial sentences could apply. Let us note that the arguments in favour of this reduction in penalties for minor offices derived from Soviet criminologists, who questioned the efficacy of short-term imprisonment. One of the most eminent among them argued from 1976 onwards that much of the increase in crime was caused by family break-up, disruption of social ties, lack of integration into broader social networks, and the increasing impact of social benefits. Isolation in prisons would only make things worse. Others, cited by Fogleson, maintained that non-custodial sentences prevented people thinking of themselves as criminals and hence actually becoming such.
Thus, in 1977–8 prominent jurists argued for ‘greater economy in the means of repression’ and changes in criminal law that would make it more effective in helping to realize the system’s general objectives. Others insisted that their findings were scientific and that policy in the late twentieth century should be based on science. Some authors urged a move away from a punitive logic to a utilitarian philosophy: retribution should take second place to the achievement of social goals.
While the Supreme Court pressed lower courts to make greater use of differential sentencing, and to be more exacting about the conduct of criminal inquiries and proof of guilt, the overall results of this policy were a disappointment to its promoters. In November 1984, the Justice Ministry concluded that some judges had not got the message and paid too little heed to the decisions of higher courts. The old policy was certainly more unproblematic and more acceptable to the repressive mentality that persisted widely in lower Soviet courts. Nevertheless, other changes were to follow, for the penal reform front was now broad and mobile.
The legal, judicial and ideological reasoning behind this impulse to break with punitive tendencies was not the whole story. The growing manpower shortage, which we shall discuss in more detail later, was a background factor in the de-penalization endeavour and the debates over it. In the Stalinist system, ‘free labour’ was no such thing, since workers were attached to their workplace by a whole series of legal and economic constraints. The actual situation was attenuated by an almost unstoppable spontaneous mobility of labour, which the authorities nevertheless sought to counter by legal and economic measures, and by campaigns of moral denunciation of shirkers and deserters.
Here we are dealing with a broader phenomenon – a natural development that could not be contained even at the height of Stalinism, and which ended up being legitimated and recognized during the post-Stalinist changes. This is what we might call the ‘de-Stalinization of labour’. Reform of the penal system and the trend towards ‘de-penalizing’ sentences formed part of this broader process. The powerful waves of change that kept sweeping over workplace relations forced penal and social policy to follow suit. The survey of labour legislation and practices that we are about to undertake indicates how, in factories and offices, workers succeeded in acquiring de jure and de facto rights. These rights were written into legal documents, beginning with the labour code.
From the very beginning of the Soviet regime, labour laws were a prominent part of the government’s agenda: the eight-hour working day, two weeks’ paid holiday, pensions, unemployment, sickness and disability insurance. On 9 December 1918 the Russian Federation’s labour code was promulgated (but never published). All those between the ages of sixteen and fifty, with the exception of the disabled, had an ‘obligation to work’. The principle of equal pay for equal work was proclaimed and various working conditions were subject to regulation. According to Soviet experts, it was the Civil War of 1918–21 that dictated enlistment of labour in place of voluntary contractual relationships. A new code promulgated on 30 October 1922 came into force on 15 November. The ‘obligation to work’ was replaced by ‘employment procedures’: labour relationships were henceforth based on voluntary agreement. The ‘obligation to work’ was restricted to exceptional situations (natural disasters, urgent public tasks). A separate chapter dealt with collective agreements and individual work contracts. Labour and management could alter the latter, as long as certain key provisions were respected. Collective negotiations were conducted by trade unions; labour disputes were settled by people’s courts; various ad hoc commissions on wages, conciliation bodies, and arbitration tribunals were established. The eight-hour day was maintained and overtime was regulated. In short, the 1922 labour code closely resembled those of Western countries, even if it favoured the state sector.
The transition to national economic planning in 1929 brought with it changes in several provisions. The state was now the sole employer and unions became a component of economic management. From 1934 onwards, they no longer drafted collective agreements, but administered social security and enforced regulations – something that had previously fallen to the powerful Labour Commissariat. In 1933 the latter was abolished: it was supposedly merged with the unions, but they did not possess the same authority as a Commissariat belonging to the government. Compulsory assignment of graduates to workplaces was introduced in 1930 as part of planning procedures. And in 1932, labour control was tightened – a single day’s absence was immediately punishable by dismissal. Nineteen thirty-eight saw a further spate of disciplinary measures: arriving late for work, or leaving early, became an offence. A decree from early 1940 proscribed resignation from a job without the consent of management. Contrariwise, the state could transfer employees at will, without their consent. Collective agreements were formally reintroduced in 1947, but despite having been abolished in 1935 they had actually survived in various guises, indicating their necessity in workplaces. As for wage increases, they became ever more dependent on centralized decisions, with some flexibility permitted at local level. Thus, between 1930 and 1940 most of the 1922 labour code had been rendered obsolete; and the text was no longer published.11
In the post-Stalin era, some of the most draconian measures were rescinded. Workers recovered the right to resign or change jobs, and new texts (1957) relaxed the strict provisions introduced during the war. A new labour code was set in train. A first draft was published for discussion in 1959, but it was only enacted in 1970 and came into force on 1 January 1971.
Analysis of these texts, and the commentaries they prompted, allows us to track the development of labour legislation up to 1986. The right to leave a job, by cancelling the contract with one’s employer, was set down as basic; management could not refuse it.12 The ‘work contract’ became a serious procedure, with numerous guarantees for both parties and special clauses favouring workers. Managerial rights were clearly spelt out, including the power to impose sanctions for misdemeanours that are detailed in the code.
Cancellation of the contract by the employee (in the case of permanent contracts) was already included in article 16 of the ‘Foundations of Labour Law’ (replicated in the Russian Federation’s labour code and elsewhere). Employees had to give two months’ notice in writing; if they had valid grounds, the period of notice could be reduced to a month. A fixed-term contract (section 2 of article 10) could be revoked by a worker ahead of time in the event of illness, disability, infringement of the regulations governing individual or collective contracts, and for other valid reasons (as specified in the new versions of the relevant section drafted in 1980 and 1983).
The 1983 version also allowed workers to leave their jobs before the two months’ notice was up. In all cases, management was obliged to return the employee’s ‘work record book’ and pay any outstanding wages. These clauses were extremely detailed and one commentator even adds that the employee is not required to explain why he wishes to leave his job (this is in connection with a 1980 text which states that two weeks’ notice is sufficient – a mere three days in the case of seasonal workers). Only those who wished to quit their job while serving a non-custodial sentence had to obtain authorization, from the body supervising their sentence.
Labour disputes take up a lot of space in the labour codes, central and republican. A whole system was established, comprising an array of institutions and rules, to handle every possible kind of complaint by workers (including work norms). Thus, every large enterprise and office was required to have a ‘labour disputes committee’, with equal union-management representation. In smaller enterprises and offices, a ‘trade-union commission’ was the competent body, and if it could not settle a dispute it was referred to a local (town or district) tribunal. Disputes involving senior employees and technical staff were a matter for the management of the enterprise concerned. If the judgement went in favour of the plaintiff, management was required not only to compensate him but also to take measures to eliminate the causes of such disputes. Where management was deemed guilty of having violated workers’ rights, the case could end up in the courts.13 In such instances, it was judged according to civil law. Prosecutors became involved and were authorized to accept complaints (in accordance with a list of very precise instructions); they even had the power to initiate proceedings if one of the parties broke the law. Employees involved in a dispute at a given level of an enterprise could simultaneously appeal to their senior management. They could go to the courts if they were not satisfied with the decision of their enterprise’s union commission. Employers had the same right. Finally, in the event of dismissal, employees could turn directly to the courts – just as employers could sue them for any damage they might have caused – without going through either the union commission or labour disputes committee.14
The code was highly elaborate and extremely detailed. It indicates that employees could act as legitimate parties in court actions over work-related issues, though it might be wondered whether the legal procedures were not excessively complicated for workers, whereas they were much more straightforward for employers. But the available statistics allow us to conclude that workers also learnt to use these procedures at different levels of conflict resolution, and turned in massive numbers to the courts, which were often more favourable to their cause than to the management’s.15
At all events, the work contract committed both parties. And if management had a lot of power, employees possessed a more effective weapon than resort to the courts: they could defend their interests by changing jobs. The phenomenon of labour turnover was studied by Soviet sociologists and statisticians in detail. Administrators – not workers – formed the privileged class, but given that labour shortages loomed on the horizon, the bureaucracy was forced to arrive at solutions and accommodations to keep workers in their posts. Larger enterprises disposed of more means to do this, offering housing, clubs, crèches and other amenities, or squeezing the expenses for them out of municipalities that often depended on the presence of such enterprises (particularly with the proliferation of factory towns – a long-forgotten chapter in the history of Western industrialization).
The broader social phenomenon just mentioned – labour turnover – affected all sectors. Underlying and surrounding the provisions of the labour code was a quite different reality, with constant changes of employer, and migration to areas with new jobs and back again when working, housing and climatic conditions proved too exacting. These labour-force trends presented economic planning with serious problems. The Stalinist solution – mobilization, coercion and police methods – was now excluded. The system’s rulers had to face what can legitimately be called a ‘labour market’ and the emergence of a tacit understanding between workers and the employer-state. It is encapsulated in the formula ‘You get what you pay for’ – or, in its surrealist version, ‘You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’. But the term ‘labour market’ captures this reality better than the ‘surrealism’ beloved of some intellectuals. What was actually occurring was the emergence and operation of an open, direct process – and/or, in part, an informal, indirect process – of economic bargaining, which justifies the use of this term. Increasing labour shortages exercised implacable constraints, because employers were not only badly in need of manpower, but also – by virtue of a paradox that hovered over the employment situation – had an interest in retaining a reserve labour-force. This created an interesting anomaly: workers leaving jobs in difficult areas with a labour shortage, on the grounds that the state had not fulfilled its contractual obligations to guarantee decent living conditions, could return to regions with a labour surplus – and still find employment.
The developments we have just described – in policing and penal policy, the abolition of the Gulag and mass terror, legal codes and labour rights – also affected the functioning of the state, its bureaucracy, and the party. A reinvigoration of conservative reflexes, and corresponding institutional changes (including in the KGB), were the leadership’s response to what it perceived of the wider social world, particularly the world of work. Confronted with mounting social pressure for greater relaxation of the regime, some wanted to react, with the KGB’s help, by tightening the screws. But it was becoming ever more difficult to find the ‘screws’ for the job.