Нормативно-правовые основания организации штрафных подразделений Красной армии в годы Великой Отечественной войны (1941–1945)

Abstract

The article deals with one of the most controversial problems that attracts the attention of both professional historians and artists, namely the topic of disciplinary battalions, disciplinary companies and their servicemen in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War of 1941- 1945. This topic is multidimensional and, without claiming to cover all or at least most of its aspects, we have focused on the study of the normative and legal foundations of the organization of disciplinary battalions and disciplinary companies. The exploration of this aspect is inevitably connected with the confrontation of facts and their analysis with various mythologems and speculations on the subject of disciplinary units in the Red Army. The author examines not only the orders of the People's Commissariats of the USSR, primarily the People's Commissariat of Defense (hereinafter - PCD), but also pre-war legislation, in particular, the Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR of 1926 and the criminal legislation of the Union republics within the USSR, which allows us to find in the pre-war criminal legislation the possibility of replacing a conviction, punishing a serviceman in wartime with imprisonment without loss of rights, with sending him to the active army, with the sentence execution being postponed until the end of hostilities. Consequently, there is a reason to assert that the normativelegal acts issued during the Great Patriotic War and, in one way or another, related to disciplinary units were adopted on the basis of and in fulfillment of the Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR of 1926 and similar codes of the Union republics. We believe that, contrary to the opinion that the creation of disciplinary units was an extremely cruel and unjustified measure of the Soviet command, this decision was dictated by the extremely difficult situation at the fronts at the height of the summer of 1942 and contributed to the strengthening of discipline both at the front and in the troops of the internal districts, i.e. was necessary and justified. The very assignment to a disciplinary unit did not mean a death sentence, either legally or actually, ; rather it gave a chance to perpetrators to be released or to have their criminal punishment commuted. The author also examines the grounds for assignment to the Red Army disciplinary units