Comrades' Courts in the Soviet Period of Russian Statehood as a Form of Non-Professional Justice

Abstract

The formation and development of comrades’ justice in the Soviet period of Russian statehood is associated with the implementation of the unified national concept of the court, conditioned not so much by professional justice as by the mass participation of non-professional judges from the people in court. The jurisdiction of cases heard in public courts was regulated by the relevant provisions and criminal codes, providing that these courts considered minor crimes, both by virtue of a direct indication in the law, and by way of delegation of the function of justice by the courts or the prosecutor’s office in each specific case. The activities of the comrades’ courts are divided into three periods. The first period — from 1919 to 1922 — is characterized by the disciplinary orientation of the comrades’ courts authorized to consider all violations of labor legislation. The second period — from 1928 to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War — is characterized by a variety of comrades’ and public courts that covered various spheres of economic, social and political activities, from Soviet enterprises and institutions to collective farms. Its main purpose was to free public courts from a mass of minor offenses and property disputes, as well as ensuring productivity growth and combating disruptors of production in enterprises and institutions. The third period — from the late 1950s to 1991 — set the goal of strengthening socialist democracy by involving a wide range of workers in the management of public affairs, including through comradely justice, which defined comrades’ courts as quasi-judicial bodies of public and state power, intrinsically inscribed in the concept of a socialist national state.