Social Control Under Stalin and Khrushchev

Book excerpt: "Under Stalin, the Soviet state used mass executions, forced deportations, and the Gulag prison system as tools to control the behavior of its citizens. However, while these activities were the most visible aspects of the regime's repression they were only one aspect of a larger experience of social control: the enforcement of social norms and the punishment of deviance from them. Such social control did not just come from above. Stalinist subjects themselves made legal claims based on their own interests, whether that meant suing for alimony, divorce, or damages, or initiating criminal cases on their own behalf. This volume assembles the latest research on a wide range of actors in the Stalinist system and the variety of ways of policing social and individual behavior. That includes essays on the Gulag and mass terror, but also juvenile delinquency, housing and property disputes, abortion, and alimony. The editors draw this together through the concept of "social control," which they draw from the scholarly literature in sociology and criminology. They have outlined a framework which should make the book useful to a wide range of Soviet and post-Soviet historians as well as scholars researching legal, sociological, and political aspects of modern authoritarian regimes."--