Introduction -- Prelude to revolution -- Rising crime before the October revolution -- Why did the crime rate shoot up? -- Militias rise and fall -- An epidemic of mob justice -- Crime after the Bolshevik takeover -- The Bolsheviks and the militia -- Conclusion

Eighteenth-century Russia -- Nineteenth-century Russia before the emancipation -- From the great reforms to revolution -- The era of Lenin -- The era of Stalin -- The USSR under "mature socialism" -- Criminal justice since the collapse of communism -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- Works cited.

Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.

A fundamentally new interpretation of the emergence of modern terrorism, arguing that it formed in the Russian literary imagination well before any shot was fired or bomb exploded.

A magisterial account of criminal law in early modern Russia in a wider European and Eurasian context.

Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.

This Very Short Introduction provides an analytical narrative of the main events and developments in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1936. It examines the impact of the revolution on society as a whole—on different classes, ethnic groups, the army, men and women, youth. Its central concern is to understand how one structure of domination was replaced by another. The book registers the primacy of politics, but situates political developments firmly in the context of massive economic, social, and cultural change. Since the fall of Communism there has been much reflection on the significance of the Russian Revolution. The book rejects the currently influential, liberal interpretation of the revolution in favour of one that sees it as rooted in the contradictions of a backward society which sought modernization and enlightenment and ended in political tyranny. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Om den russiske mafia, som ikke kun er bander og organiseret krig, men også et voldeligt udtryk for den revolutionære klassekamp

"According to official Soviet propaganda, crime is an adjunct of capitalism and has virtually disappeared in the Soviet Union; whatever crimes are committed are attributed to survivals of capitalism sixty years after the Revolution. As a result, crime statistics are hard to come by, and even legal scholars cannot always get access to court records. Nevertheless, Soviet dissident Valery Chalidze, using whatever records he was able to find and drawing on previous conversations with informed individuals in the USSR, here presents a side of the Soviet Union not previously covered in books on the subject. His object is to fill some of the gaps that exist in the outside world's knowledge of the USSR, but he also confesses that "I have always been fascinated by the customs and personalities of Russian criminals," and he begins with the centuries-old Russian criminal tradition--the attitude, often of tolerance, toward various kinds of crime that no later history has been able to erase completely. He covers the use made of the criminal underworld by the Bolsheviks during their rise to power and the later split between the underworld and the new regime. And he discusses in some detail recent murders, rapes, thefts and the all-prevailing 'hooliganism' (acts of random violence, often while drunk) that accounts for a vast majority of court cases today. Finally he turns to such peculiarly Soviet crimes as 'private enterprise' and 'entrepreneurism.'" -- Provided by publisher

A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency—the infamous GULAG. The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects. Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable—a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population. Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.