Sex and Drugs and Revolutionary Justice: Negotiating 'Female Criminality' in the Early Soviet Courtroom

Abstract

Pavel A. Vasilyev – kandidat nauk (PhD) in Russian History, Postdoctoral Fellow, Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Israel. Email: pavelv@vanleer.org.il

This article builds on previous research on early Soviet female criminality, in particular the studies by Sharon A. Kowalsky and Dan Healey, that have demonstrated how Soviet courts and criminologists explained and handled crimes committed by females, revealing, in the process, profound ambiguities and contradictions in their attitudes towards women. However, unlike Kowalsky and Healey, I focus on an earlier period (1917–1922) and make extensive use of the under-researched archival collections of Petrograd’s local judicial institutions (People’s Courts), drawing on materials such as investigatory reports and court proceedings. Focusing on a 1919 criminal case from the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg (Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, TsGA SPb) in particular, this paper argues that in the volatile setting of the early Soviet courtroom 'female criminality' was not a clear-cut concept, but rather a malleable product of intense negotiations that involved all legal actors and centered around the contested notions of female subjectivity, socialist ideology, and the material conditions of living. Employing quasi-theatrical language, I first introduce the protagonists and describe the background of this criminal case. Then, I look at the litigation strategies that the two main female defendants employed and the different ways in which they highlighted the material embeddedness of their emotions. Finally, I examine the expressions of remorse and reflect on their role in sentencing within the wider context of the ongoing Russian Civil War and the early Soviet legal reforms. By viewing 'female criminality' as a product of open-ended negotiations and by re-emphasizing the material conditions of revolutionary Petrograd, the article provides a new perspective on gender, crime and the administration of justice in that turbulent period.