Politische Justiz unter Stalin im Umbruchjahrzehnt 1928-1938

"Courts and administrative justice were decisive instruments of Stalinist rule in the USSR. Especially during Stalin's 'Revolution from Above' in the late twenties and early thirties and in the Great Terror of 1937/38 political justice played an important role for the implementation of Stalinist politics. The special features of Stalinist political justice are its fictiousness with many thousands of falsified indictments, the staging of show trials and the coexistence of courts together with extrajudicial punishment 'by administrative means'." (author's abstract