<< Other documents and texts >>

This list (CCE 27.5, October 1972: “Camps and prisons”) highlights the deliberate confusion in the 1960 RSFSR Criminal Code, and those of the other 14 union republics, as to what constituted an “especially serious State crime”.

That section of the code did not include serious crimes against the individual (murder, rape), but embraced offences ranging from treason, espionage, terrorism and sabotage (64-66, 68) through “promotion of war” (Article 69) to ‘Anti-Soviet’ activities (Articles 70 & 72).

(One special approach was to classify as “Treason” any attempt to leave the USSR by illegally crossing the border; a report in an early issue of the Chronicle, CCE 4.4, described some of those convicted of this “grave offence”.)

*

In 1986, KGB chairman Chebrikov (25 September 1986*, Pb) listed some of these crimes for his fellow Politburo members:

“In total 240 individuals have been prosecuted and are now serving sentences for committing these types of crime. These are people convicted of espionage, crossing the State frontier, distributing hostile leaflets, dealing in hard currency, and so on.”

The mixing of dissent with other harmful activities and the accompanying confusion in official minds and public perceptions has persisted in Russia.

*

In the 1990s, a new Constition (1993) was adopted that put crimes against the individual first and not, as in the 1936 and 1977 Soviet Constitutions, crimes ‘against the State’. A new Criminal Code (1996) and a new Criminal-Procedural Code (2000) also began to change such attitudes.

JC (revised 2024)

PS — Four months later, incidentally, Chebrikov (1 February 1987* (183-Ch) was already quoting different figures.

============================