Appendix E. Court cases and the market

Court cases are not what we commonly think of under the rubric “new Soviet archives,” but they proved a useful and interesting type of source in relation to the market and daily life. What follows is a brief description of my work with court cases, followed by a description of the information that one can find in this class of documents. My assumption is that they are of interest primarily to social historians.

I did my initial research into criminal cases in the court records of the Moscow city archives, now TsMAM, in 1993. At that time, I sought court cases in two other locations, the Moscow and Odessa oblast’ archives, but each presented insurmountable obstacles to their use, as did the Kursk oblast’ archives several years later. The basic problem was that these archives filed case records exclusively by the last name of the defendant, with no indication in the opisi of the nature of the offense. In Moscow, both at the raion people’s court level and the municipal court, opisi did indicate the crime, thus making it possible to survey all extant cases relating to trade and the market. Some years later, in 1998, I was also able to obtain criminal records from Riazan’ oblast’. There, too, cases were filed by name rather than offense, but an archivist, Nina, generously took the time to cull out the relevant cases from the stacks.

My interest in using court cases was in some ways analogous to my interest in the Kredit-biuro: I wanted to find detailed information on private, informal businesses and transactions after the demise of the NEP. The basic rubric under which these transactions were prosecuted during the Stalin period was speculation (Article 107 of the RSFSR Criminal Code), which accounted for all but a few of the 220 cases on the informal economy that I was able to locate; a few instances of deception of the customer, bribery, and violations of the rules of trade, and and theft of public property (laws of August 7, 1932, and June 4, 1947) made up the rest. Criminal records could be a valuable source for a variety of other topics, however. Besides the crimes that interested me (which were in fact among the most numerous of those preserved in the Moscow court archives, at least), the Moscow courts recorded a great many violations of the passport regulations in the 1940s and 1950s, and fewer, but still significant, instances of illegal abortion; homosexual sodomy; bribery; home-distilling; and statutory rape, as well as the usual array of homicides, burglaries, and organized or individual thuggery. I was told that casefiles for crimes carrying sentences of less than three years were destroyed on a routine schedule.

The organization of the case files reflected standard criminal procedures of the day. By the late 1930s, the prosecution of black-market cases after the initial arrest had become routinized and relatively impartial: an investigation into speculation or theft of socialist property was typically opened only after the police had caught someone in the act of stealing, buying up, transporting, or selling goods. Beginning with arrest, the investigation comprised a standard series of steps, which left a typical paper trail of 75-300 pages of handwritten testimonies from the accused as well as from neighbors, acquaintances, and suppliers of goods (note: the cases from Riazan’ oblast’ tended to be much thinner, on the order of 25-70 pages, no doubt reflecting a difference in the available personnel); reports from the arrest, body search, and apartment search; a 1-3 page typed summary of the case by the Procuracy; the trial proceedings and sentence (handwritten and almost never a literal transcript); a typewritten appeal by either a lawyer for the defendant or the Procuracy; and a report on the execution of the sentence or its reversal upon review.

Different parts of these cases offer the researcher different kinds of information. One stage of the investigation of which social historians should be apprised is the apartment search, an obligatory procedure in cases of speculation, theft of public property, and other major crimes. Carried out as soon as possible after the arrest, the apartment search served two distinct functions. In black-market cases, these searches provided material evidence for the prosecution; Soviet criminal justice focused on intentionality, which in such cases tended to make “excess” property tantamount to an observed speculative exchange. The primary purpose of the apartment search, however, was simply to register the suspect’s property in a complete inventory for future confiscation. These inventories contain potentially valuable information for historians of everyday life. Investigators noted everything their suspects owned, down to shabby coats and metal cots. Even in Moscow, these inventories testified to the poverty of Soviet citizens’ material culture. The most well-appointed apartment in all of my cases had a piano, a television (admittedly a rarity in 1951!), a bookshelf, and an oak buffet, in addition to the usual furnishings of one or two metal cots, a chest of drawers, a small table with plain chairs, and a divan. Significantly, these last modest furnishings exceeded the norm in my set of black-market investigations, the majority of which concluded with no property to list. A few suspected speculators owned one modern amenity like a sewing machine or a record-player, but even they typically had very little else to their name. As a caveat, one would need a far bigger database than mine to use inventories for more than impressionistic evidence about citizens’ possessions, and one would also have to consider the economic profile of crime suspects vis-à-vis the population at large. Nonetheless, it could be interesting to compare Moscow data with inventories from provincial cities, or to chart property lists over a longer period of time. I have not seen inventories from deceased citizens’ estates, the classic source for historians of material culture, so for all their shortcomings, the lists in criminal cases may fill a void. Otherwise, our best chance of figuring out what people owned is through production statistics, which have their own deficiencies: they are far less specific, and they offer no indication of the lifespan of the goods.

Social historians might also want to know about the personal background sheet filled out for each defendant in criminal cases. In the 1930s-1950s, this form registered the person’s date of birth, place of birth (sometimes omitted), social origins (less likely to be included by the end of the 1940s), current occupation, education, nationality, family status, current residence, and any previous convictions. This questionnaire presumably formed the basis of the demographic analyses of crime that featured in Prokuratura reports and occasionally appeared in the legal press.

Finally, social historians might want find the detailed testimonies of neighbors and acquaintances an interesting window into the social milieu of the day. Literally hundreds of pages were devoted to this.