Born to be criminal : the discourse on criminality and the practice of punishment in late Imperial Russia and early Soviet Union : interdisciplinary Approaches

This collection of essays explores the continuities and disruptions in the perceptions of criminality, its causes and ways of fighting it in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. It focuses on both the discourse on criminality and thus the conceptualisation of criminality in various disciplines (criminology, psychiatry, and literature), and penal practice, that is, different aspects of criminal law and anti-crime policy. Thus, the volume is markedly interdisciplinary, with authors representing a variety of approaches in history and literary studies, from social history to discourse analysis, from the history of sciences to text analysis. Content Acknowledgements Introduction I. Inborn Criminality and the Late Russian Empire The Empire-Born Criminal P. I. Kovalevskii Criminality, Deviance, and Anthropological Diversity II. On the Treatment of Social Deviance and Criminals in the Late 1920s-early 1930S Recidivism, Social Atavism, and State Security in Early Soviet Policing Cesare Lombroso and the Social Engineering of Soviet Society Concepts of the Criminal in the Discourse of “Perekovka” III. Political and ‘Other’ Prisoners – Literature of the Gulag Criminals in Gulag Accounts Varlam Shalamov’s Sketches of the Criminal World On the Contributors