Special Issue: Crime and Criminal Justice in the Post-Soviet Region
Crime and criminal justice after communism: Why study the post-Soviet region?
Gavin Slade and Matthew Light
Gavin Slade and Matthew Light
Articles
Post-Soviet criminal justice: The persistence of distorted neo-inquisitorialism
Peter H Solomon, Jr
Post-Soviet criminal justice: The persistence of distorted neo-inquisitorialism
Peter H Solomon, Jr
This article investigates the extent to which post-Soviet states have successfully reformed the system of criminal justice that they inherited from the USSR, and in particular reduced accusatorial bias and achieved procedural fairness. I argue that with the notable exception of Estonia, these countries have not eliminated the defining features of the Soviet criminal justice, what I call ‘distorted neo-inquisitorialism’—namely the excessive power of investigators and weakness of judges. The article examines in detail the reform of criminal justice in Russia, Estonia and Ukraine from 1992 to the present.
Architecture and attachment: Carceral collectivism and the problem of prison reform in Russia and Georgia
Laura Piacentini and Gavin Slade
Laura Piacentini and Gavin Slade
This article looks at the trajectory of prison reform in post-Soviet Georgia and Russia. It attempts to understand recent developments through an analysis of the resilient legacies of the culture of punishment born out of the Soviet period. To do this, the article fleshes out the concept of carceral collectivism, which refers to the practices and beliefs that made up prison life in Soviet and now post-Soviet countries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 revealed a penal culture in notable need of reform. Less obvious, in retrospect, was how over the course of a century this predominantly ‘collectivist’ culture of punishment was instantiated in routine penal practices that stand in opposition to western penalities. The article shows how the social and physical structuring of collectivism and penal self-governance have remained resilient in the post-Soviet period despite diverging attempts at reform in Russia and Georgia. The article argues that persistent architectural forms and cultural attachment to collectivism constitute this resilience. Finally, the article asks how studies of collectivist punishment in the post-Soviet region might inform emerging debates about the reform and restructuring of individualizing, cell-based prisons in western jurisdictions.
Political corruption in Eurasia: Understanding collusion between states, organized crime and business
Alexander Kupatadze
Alexander Kupatadze
This article presents the problem of illicit collusion between states, organized criminals and white-collar criminals in the post-Soviet region, showing the blurring of these phenomena. It charts the development of political corruption and argues that this is a particular problem in the region due to the way state resources were sold off during the 1990s. The article however shows that the countries of the region now diverge significantly in terms of the extent and form that collusion takes. The goal of the article is to understand this variation. The article suggests that roughly two broad categories of state now exist in the post-Soviet region, excluding the Baltic States. These are broadly politically competitive states such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia and broadly politically non-competitive ones such as Russia, Belarus or Kazakhstan. I show that collusion takes differing forms across these categories due to the effect that the presence or absence of political competition has. In conclusion I argue that the post-Soviet region provides little evidence to believe that political competition actually reduces corruption and collusion. However, some cases from the region show that successful anti-corruption campaigns are more likely where there is more political contestation.
Policing following political and social transitions: Russia, Brazil, and China compared
Matthew Light, Mariana Mota Prado, and Yuhua Wang
Matthew Light, Mariana Mota Prado, and Yuhua Wang
This is a comparative analysis of policing in three countries that have experienced a major political or social transition, Russia, Brazil, and China. We consider two related questions: (1) how has transition in each country affected the deployment of the police against regime opponents (which we term “repression”)? And (2) how has the transition affected other police misconduct that also victimizes citizens but is not directly ordered by the regime (“abuse”)? As expected, authoritarian regimes are more likely to perpetrate severe repression. However, the most repressive authoritarian regimes such as China may also contain oversight institutions that limit police abuse. We also assess the relative importance of both transitional outcomes and processes in post-transition policing evolution, arguing that the “abusiveness” of contemporary Brazilian police reflects the failure to create oversight mechanisms during the transition, and that the increasing “repressiveness” of Chinese police reflects a conscious effort by the Chinese Communist Party to reinforce the police in an era of economic liberalization. In contrast, Russian police are both significantly abusive and repressive, although less systematically “repressive” than Chinese police, and less “abusive” (or at least violent) than Brazilian police. Also, abuse and repression are less distinct in Russia than in the other cases. These results reflect the initial processes of decay and fragmentation, and subsequent partial recovery and recentralization, which Russian police have experienced since the Soviet collapse.
Racist violence in Russia has recently become a subject of interest to scholars and analysts of Russian politics. What are the similarities and differences between racist violence in Russia and the West? How does the level of Russian racist violence compare to other societies? Do racist hate groups in Russia have similar origins to groups in the West? This article considers these questions. I first demonstrate that Russia is indeed the most dangerous country in Europe for ethnic minorities, and argue that such violence is more ‘systematic’ (structured, ideologically coherent, patterned) than in other developed societies. The high level of violence against ethnic minorities in Russia is ‘over-determined’ by a combination of post-Soviet social and economic social changes, the brutalizing consequences of a long counter-insurgency campaign, and government passivity (and sometimes complicity) in the face of racist violence and hate speech. Thus, Russia’s systematic racist violence is analytically closer to outright ethnic conflict than to a form of criminal deviance that could aptly be termed ‘hate crime’.
What is Russia’s real homicide rate? Statistical reconstruction and the ‘decivilizing process’
Alexandra Lysova and Nikolay Shchitov
Alexandra Lysova and Nikolay Shchitov
This article examines a paradox that relates to the issue of homicide in Russia. On the one hand, official police statistics demonstrate a rapid decline in the homicide rate in Russia in the 2000s, which is consistent with the stable economic growth (in particular after the financial crisis of 1998) and a stable political environment during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. On the other hand, other conditions and processes (e.g. rampant corruption, predatory policing, political repressions, state violence against businesses, rising xenophobia and apathy) point to what Norbert Elias terms a ‘decivilizing process’, which is expected to be associated with a less precipitous decline in homicide or stable homicide rate in this period. In fact, newly available homicide estimates suggest that the homicide rate was higher than and did not decline at a pace suggested by the official police and mortality sources in the 2000s. Hence, this article has two main objectives. First, it discusses issues around homicide statistics in Russia and argues that the newly available homicide estimates represent the more accurate statistics. Second, it explores decivilizing process theory as a potential framework for explaining a high and steady homicide rate in Russia in the 2000s.
Review Article
Informality, crime and corruption in Russia: A review of recent literature
Leonid Kosals and Anastasia Maksimova
Informality, crime and corruption in Russia: A review of recent literature
Leonid Kosals and Anastasia Maksimova
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