From All Sides: Interdisciplinary Knowledge, Scientific Collaboration, and the Soviet Criminological Laboratories of the 1920s
Author(s)
Pinnow, Kenneth M.
Date Issued
May 2, 2017
Abstract
The erosion of boundaries was a common motif in descriptions of Soviet life during the 1920s. It provided a powerful way of signifying the different rules in operation after the Bolshevik Revolution. Soviet criminal science was a microcosm of this larger change in thought and practice. Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet, the jurist and criminologist, was particularly fond of using the imagery of prerevolutionary boundaries and their post-revolutionary destruction to describe developments in his field. Under the autocracy, he claimed, scientists were kept away from criminals and their site of containment—the prison. It was, Gernet noted with a degree of dark humor, rather easy to gain entry to a Tsarist prison cell as a political activist, but not as a researcher, who was met at the prison door with the sign: “Entrance to outsiders is strictly prohibited.” In sharp contrast, Soviet scientists were invited into the prisons and given direct access to the inmates. Gernet wrote: “The possibility for us to go right up to living criminals first appeared under Soviet power; until then, we only saw them in the courtroom and behind prison bars, and were not given the opportunity to get near them.”
Journal
Slavic Review
Department
History
Citation
Pinnow, K.M. (2017)From All Sides: Interdisciplinary Knowledge, Scientific Collaboration, and the Soviet Criminological Laboratories of the 1920s. Slavic Review 76: 122-146. doi:10.1017/slr.2017.14
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Version of Article
Published article
DOI
10.1017/slr.2017.14
ISSN
0037-6779
Rights
Author's Pre-print on author's personal website, departmental website, social media websites, institutional repository, non-commercial subject-based repositories, such as PubMed Central, Europe PMC or arXiv
Author's post-print on author's personal website, departmental website, institutional repository, non-commercial subject-based repositories, such as PubMed Central, Europe PMC or arXiv, on acceptance of publication
Publisher's version/PDF cannot be used
Published abstract may be deposited
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