Adam Lityński

In his monumental non-fiction book, The Gulag Archipelago, Nobel Prize winning author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn illustrates real events in Soviet labor camps in literary form. The depiction of EVIL is shocking. The totalitarian Soviet regime subjected millions of people to a horrific fate. As is gener- ally well-known, Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Soviet concentration camp. Mass terror was the essence of Soviet totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn included a lecture on Soviet criminal law in his book, stressing the importance of Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union in authorizing this terrorism. Solzhenitsyn himself was not a lawyer. However, his conclusions were very accurate. Article 58 of the Criminal Code, which consisted of seventeen paragraphs, defined “counter-revolutionary offenses”. They were obviously punished most rticle 58 became a weapon of terror for the Soviet authorities, who used it convict millions of innocent people.

In his monumental non-fiction book, The Gulag Archipelago, Nobel Prize-winning author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn illustrates real events in Soviet labor camps in literary form. The depiction of EVIL is shocking. The totalitarian Soviet regime subjected millions of people to a horrific fate. As is generally well-known, A. Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Soviet concentration camp. Mass terror was the essence of Soviet totalitarianism. A. Solzhenitsyn included a lecture on Soviet criminal law in his book, stressing the importance of Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union in authorizing this terrorism. Solzhenitsyn himself was not a lawyer. However, his conclusions were very accurate. Article 58 of the Criminal Code, which consisted of seventeen paragraphs, defined “counter-revolutionary offenses”. They were obviously punished most severely. Article 58 became a weapon of terror for the Soviet authorities, who used it to convict millions of innocent people.

This article is an English translation of the paper published in Polish in Cracow Studies of Constitutional and Legal History in 2022. See: Lityński, “Sowieckie prawo karne”.

Today, the nature and consequences of the so-called elimination of the Kulak class and collectivization of peasantry in the 20s and 30s in the USSR are already known. Less known is the fact that another mass repression of the so-called Kulaks followed in 1937. On July of 1937, the Politburo of the communist party ordered to “arrest immediately all Kulaks […] and after an administrative examination of their cases by a troika, execute by firing squad the most hostile,” those less reluctant were to be locked up in forced-labour camps. The genocidal repressions were included in central planning – a quota for each region was established. On the basis of the above-mentioned Politburo order, the then People’s Commissar (NKVD), Nikolai Yezhov, gave order no. 00447 On repression of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements, on the 30th July 1937. It was planned that 268 950 people were to be arrested, including 75 950 to be executed, but this list was incomplete and was later on supplemented; avid regions applied for increasing the quota and considerably surpassed the number of planned arrests, executions and deportations to labour camps.