| Abstract [eng] |
The research object of the given dissertation is the map of the Soviet concepts of crime and punishment, their content and functioning on different Soviet political, institutional, social, chronological and spatial levels and spaces: from post-revolutionary Russia to the Perestroika-guided Soviet world; from the Centre of the Soviet Empire (Moscow) to its Periphery (one particular Soviet Republic, Soviet Lithuania). The research is focused on the ideas, concepts and definitions of crime and punishment, which were formulated in the Soviet Union and Soviet Lithuania, and the development of these ideas and concepts until the collapse of the USSR. In this way, the research aims to generate some new insights into the nature and specifics of the Soviet-type criminal law and the system of criminal justice and criminal prosecution, and to give an answer to the question whether it was the entirely repressive mechanism, a tool of political power, as “the myth of the Gulag” claims, or if Soviet criminal law had at least some features of a separate, partially independent structure of criminal justice. Soviet Lithuanian concepts of “crime”, “punishment”, and “criminal” (their meanings and content) are investigated in 6 different levels: political discourse and official Soviet ideology, professional (expert) criminological knowledge, the Mass Media, the field of criminal prosecution, the law braking level, and the discourse of the “people from the street”. |
