Banditen und Juristen im Tauwetter. GULag-Reform, kriminelle Gegenkultur und kriminologische Expertise

International audienceAs Stalin's heirs dismantled his Gulag empire, criminal gangs established in the camps appeared as a considerable threat not only to discipline within the archipelago, but to Soviet society as a whole, with millions of amnestied convicts being released from detention. Aware of its lack of an understanding of the social mechanisms leading to the formation of well-organized and brutal gangs, the penal administration revived the still forbidden criminology. In the second half of the 1950s law experts conducted scientific investigations of the criminal underworld of the blatnye, "criminals-in-Law" and "renegades." The construction of gangs as an object of sociological concern (what Lutz Raphael labels "Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen") lead to a successful policy to eradicate them, relying on the introduction of harsh anti-gang laws (with the "especially dangerous recidivist" at the core of the new legislation) and on the implementation of new disciplinary principles in the penal system to impede the formation of gangs. However, despite the success of the policy to eradicate the camp gangs, the criminal subculture they carried did not disappear. On the contrary, the code of honour and the anti-Soviet traditions of the elitist "thieves" evolved toward a universal set of rules acknowledged by the majority of the prison population who used it to repel intrusions by the administration and to fight against informants. The propagation among convicts and from there in Soviet society of prison anti-Soviet ethics remained an unmastered legacy of Stalin's camp system