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Bytovukha
Family Violence in Soviet Russia
Marianna Muravyeva
ABSTRACT
The article gives a systematic assessment of legal a itudes toward family and domestic
violence in Soviet Russia to examine whether the incidence of family violence remained
as high as it was in the pre-revolutionary period, whether forms of family violence
changed due to the new regime and new legal categories, and whether and how the
new gender regime (i.e., the proclaimed equality of women and men) infl uenced the
state of family violence in Soviet Russia. The analysis reveals that the Soviet state used
the concepts of “hooliganism” and “family-domestic crimes” as the legal frameworks
to deal with family violence while the concept of the “problem family” was employed
to suggest prevention policies against domestic violence. The article also addresses the
problem of continuity in social and criminal policies of Russia within the current ap-
plication of “traditional values” and explains why this concept is consistent with the
Soviet past.
KEYWORDS: domestic violence, family-domestic crimes, hooliganism, intrafamily kill-
ings, Soviet Russia
p
Erofeev, a football player, had a wife.
Her name was Nonna.
They quarreled very o en.
The gossip was that Nonna was cheating on him.
He punished her quite peculiarly, that is,
Put her between the doors, placed a ball in front of him,
Then took a run and administered a penalty kick.
Nonna lost her consciousness most of the time.
—Sergei Dovlatov, Solo na undervude1
On 12 January 2013 Moscow was shocked by the news that the dismembered body of
Irina Cherska, a thirty-nine-year-old journalist, was found in the boot of a car. Irina had
aspasia Volume 8, 2014: 90–124
doi:10.3167/asp.2014.080106
BYTOVUKHA 91
been reported missing several days before by her husband Alexei Kabanov, a thirty-
eight-year-old cook who cofounded a legendary bohemian hangout in the capital. He
also launched a broad eff ort to locate her, complete with emotional posts on his Face-
book page. Kabanov admi ed to commi ing the murder a er parts of Cherska’s body,
including her head and limbs, were found in a car he had borrowed from a friend.
He said he strangled Cherska in a fl ash of domestic violence on 3 January and then
dismembered her body and stashed it in the car, hoping to get rid of it later. Several
family acquaintances alleged on social networks that Kabanov routinely beat Cherska,
though the accusations could not be verifi ed.2 This case represented a high-profi le but
typical example of bytovukha—a domestic quarrel between spouses that ended in the
wife’s death.3
Russian NGOs immediately used this brutal murder to a ract lawmakers’ and
the public’s a ention to the gap in legislation and generally depressing situation of
domestic violence in Russian families. The fi gure of ten thousand women killed an-
nually by their relatives or partners popped up again to mark the scale of abuse.4
This time the authorities reacted immediately with the information that the Russian
Public Chamber, a newly formed institution aimed at promoting cooperation between
the government, NGOs, and citizens, had been working on a piece of legislation that
would protect the victims of domestic violence by allowing for the issuing of restrain-
ing orders, among other things. However, in contrast to the discussions of the 1990s,
which addressed domestic violence as an issue of women’s human rights, this legal
initiative prioritized the interests and rights of children several times. Some members
of the Public Chamber even invoked the popular concept of “traditional values” to jus-
tify the necessity of comba ing domestic violence. Some (mostly male) participants in
the discussion constantly called this problem “semeino-bytovoe nasilie” (family-domestic
violence).5 These references marked important political thresholds both in family and
criminal policies of the Russian state, which offi cially employed a traditionalist dis-
course centered on children but excluding women, and at the same time returned to
the late Soviet criminological concept of domestic violence as a part of the everyday
social environment, caused by economic problems and alcoholism. It is the aim of
this article to trace the roots of legal a itudes toward family violence against women
in particular in Soviet policymaking and to reveal a continuity in the priorities and
trends of criminal and social policies in both the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts.
Since the early 1980s, domestic violence has been a prime subject in international
human rights discourse, and transnational feminist activist networks have success-
fully used the universal claims of human rights to explicitly highlight women’s rights
in connection with this topic.6 Violence against women has since become a sign of gen-
der inequality and sustained patriarchy despite obvious achievements in the sphere of
human rights. The defi nition of domestic violence includes the essential elements of
establishing and exerting power and control over another, mostly by men over their
spouses and partners.7 Although the term “domestic violence”8 has been debated since
its introduction into the women’s movement in the early 1970s, it remains a platform
for the further conceptualization of violence in relation to gender and patriarchy.
In the 1990s the Russian women’s movement addressed these issues and concep-
tualized domestic violence with the same feminist concepts, including the notion of
92 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
women’s human rights, used by the United Nations and the international women’s
movement. However, the last decade has seen a gradual exclusion of the feminist
agenda from policy issues in Russia, a downplaying of the notion of gender, and a
reconfi guring of the understanding of human rights. These changes have allowed pol-
icymakers to emphasize the rights of children instead of those of women, and to dis-
miss gender inequality as the main reason for domestic and broader family violence.9
This article uses the term “family violence” to include other types of violence such as
child abuse and intrafamily killings to provide the context of wider power relations
and argue that child abuse as well as intrafamily killings are deeply gendered and can-
not be analyzed outside a gender-based violence framework.10
In the Soviet Union and now in post-Soviet Russia there has been a dearth of infor-
mation concerning domestic or family violence. The 1990s created an acute interest in
the topic together with concern about the scale of violence, mostly thanks to NGOs and
the crisis center movement as well as the development of the women’s movement and
a feminist agenda more broadly.11 However, despite sociological and legal research on
contemporary domestic and family violence, Russia has failed to produce any consis-
tent scholarship on the history of domestic and gender-based violence. While scholars
recognize that pre-revolutionary Russia had high levels of domestic violence due to its
traditional family structures and patriarchal gender order, the Soviet period of Rus-
sian history remains unstudied in this particular respect, although the availability of
sources and general theoretical frameworks, together with an immediate connection
to and infl uence on present-day policies, could be considered natural conditions for
such research. However, seminal works on Russian and Soviet women mention do-
mestic violence only in passing.12
Almost every researcher discusses the complex and paradoxical history of Russian
and Soviet women. Following the 1917 Revolution, women and men were given the
same political and other rights by constitutional decrees, including the 1918 Constitu-
tion.13 The new Bolshevik state legalized abortion, provided state-supported childcare,
and recognized the right of married women to live separately from their husbands
with full rights to divorce. An underlying principle of both Marxist and Leninist the-
ory was that the status of women defi ned a country’s cultural and economic progress.
As women became half of the Soviet workforce and claimed positions in fi elds such as
medicine and education, the Soviet Union insisted that women’s full inclusion in the
economic and political arenas was proof of the superiority of socialism. However, this
equality was not seen as gender-specifi c but as a universal precondition for advancing
into communism.
During the Stalin era, when state controls were strengthened, issues traditionally
important for women were declared to be secondary in comparison to class and com-
munity concerns. Stalin proclaimed in 1930 that women had become fully emancipated
and thus no longer needed special representation. Although Soviet women found
themselves with a wide variety of employment opportunities and political positions,
they discovered that their “new freedom” meant a double burden of working full-time
jobs earning 70 percent of what their male counterparts made as well as continuing to
be responsible for practically all household and childrearing duties.14
BYTOVUKHA 93
As a result, the Soviet woman was expected to be an exemplary worker and to
develop qualities appropriate for the workplace; yet, she was also supposed to have
certain “natural” traits and behavioral pa erns suitable for domesticity and child-
care. This image was in harmony with the “rehabilitation” of the family a er the
experimental 1920s and helped to provide some stability in people’s lives through
the familiarity of traditional family life. The family acquired a new symbolic sig-
nifi cance as the Soviet state had turned itself into one enormous family.15 However,
the new female agency was o en not welcomed by men and husbands. Traditional
male a itudes towards women proved rather resistant to change, and narratives of
how to overcome incidents of domestic violence signaled this resistance during the
1920s and 1930s. Lynn A wood describes how magazines such as Rabotnitsa (Work-
ing woman) and Krest’ianka (Peasant woman) presented the problem. They received
many le ers from their female readers who shared their narratives of abuse. Articles
in the magazines depicted husbands persisting in using their wives as servants and
beating them if they no longer complied. Women who a empted to get more in-
volved in society or to assert their rights found themselves particular targets of male
anger; there were frequent reports of men beating their wives for organizing or even
a ending meetings and even of female activists being murdered by disapproving
husbands. One article told of a husband hacking his young wife to death with an
axe on the grounds that she devoted insuffi cient time to housework and childcare.16
Sheila Fitzpatrick also speaks about domestic violence as a crucial mark of female bi-
ographies and how overcoming this violence has formed women’s personalities and
infl uenced their identities.17
These narratives of wife-beating and spousal violence have been known to schol-
ars. Soviet mass media allowed a certain amount of negative information, especially
on the eve of important campaigns such as those focused on combating hooliganism
or preventing juvenile crime. However, between the 1930s and 1960s the state treaded
very carefully in the fi eld of overall criminal policy in order not to reveal the existence
of trends similar to those in capitalist countries. Moreover, the state claimed that some
types of crime had ceased to exist altogether. In view of offi cial gender equality and the
new model of the Soviet family based on true communist morals, to admit that women
were being beaten or killed by their husbands meant admi ing that the whole project
had failed.18 Therefore, before the 1960s the Soviet state did not single out family vio-
lence as a serious problem outside of the general criminal context of deviant behavior,
which resulted in the absence of any specifi c criminal statistics and criminological
literature.
This article includes an analysis of several important issues, including legal at-
titudes toward family violence and their conceptualization via hooliganism and fam-
ily-domestic crimes (semeino-bytovye prestupleniia), as well as an in-depth analysis of
several types of family violence: domestic violence and spousal murder, fi licide, and
parricide. To provide such an analysis, the article utilizes various sources, including
Soviet legislation, Soviet criminological literature, Soviet offi cial crime statistics, and
Soviet court practice. The article’s hypothesis is that, although family violence was
common in Soviet times, the Soviet authorities failed to recognize it as an important
94 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
issue because such recognition would have implied acknowledging the failure of the
Soviet equality project.
Family Violence and Soviet Law
According to the Bolshevik project, women were not supposed to experience domes-
tic violence. Moreover, the family as an institution had to be a be er place, which is
why the Bolshevik and later the Soviet government undertook wide-scale actions to
reform family law to deal with the remnants of the past. One of the main revolutionary
slogans, that of equality, had to be realized both in the public and private spheres, so
the new family had to be built upon equal partnership of women and men. Reaching
equality was considered a remedy against domestic violence.19
Scholars have claimed that the nature of the Soviet family changed towards more
privacy and was gradually privatized by the Khrushchev era. The public/private di-
chotomy has preoccupied scholars who seek to conceptualize Soviet spaces and try
to fi nd adequate tools to research everyday practices, violence included. As Lewis H.
Siegelbaum has noted, the a empt to map private spheres in Soviet Russia is com-
plicated by the fact that the very term for “private” (chastnoe) was banished for all
intents and purposes from the Soviet lexicon in the 1930s.20 Scholars mostly disagree
on the degree of privatization in postwar Russia, simply accepting that before it every-
thing was offi cially “public.” Oleg Kharkhordin has argued, following Foucault, that
a “balanced system of total surveillance, fi rmly rooted in people’s policing each other
in an orderly and relatively peaceful manner,” reached its apotheosis under Khrush-
chev, and that to the extent that a private sphere existed at all, it was produced by the
practice of dissimulation. Soviet citizens established a private realm only as “a secret
sphere of intimate life” where, in contrast to their public behavior, individuals led a
life of dissimulation.21 According to this literature, the Soviet family did not offi cially
constitute a private space but was seen as a public institution with important public
functions. Soviet law thus had to make sure that the family functioned according to
socialist standards.
Early Soviet legislation (the family codes of 1918 and 1926) made radical a empts
to alter the role of the family (and women’s place within it) based on the Marxist con-
ception of the family, which explained it in terms of economic forces. This early legis-
lation was also connected with the Marxist understanding of the role of law, together
with the family and the state, which were supposed to wither away (in Friedrich
Engels’s famous words).22 Therefore, early Soviet lawyers a acked pre-revolution-
ary family law, which they saw as reinforcing capitalist society. Soviet legislation
a empted to reshape relationships between the family and the wider society. The
process of industrialization was itself, in the Soviet view, whi ling away the family’s
critical economic and educative functions. All economic activities had to be trans-
ferred to the wider society. Public education was meant to take care of children. All
these changes, it was believed, would free women and men to fully participate in the
labor force and at the same time prepare the conditions for the extinction of the fam-
ily as an institution.23
BYTOVUKHA 95
The family codes of 1918 and of 192624 altered the distribution of roles and power
within the family itself. They challenged the foundations of female subordination to
uphold the full equality of the partners. Divorce was made available without any rea-
sons. Women and men were allowed to have separate residences so they would be mo-
bile to meet the state’s needs. Equality was also extended to parental responsibilities as
mothers and fathers received identical rights in regard to their children.
However, by the 1930s the situation became hectic and provoked conservative re-
actions to most of the 1920s’ experiments, including those in gender relationships. The
shi in family policy was motivated by the economic and political requirements of
Stalinism. Stalin’s industrialization needed a larger labor force, which was recruited
among peasants and was also to be ensured by high birthrates. Together with the
so-called social problems (an increase in homeless and abandoned children, juvenile
crime, and the number of single mothers) these economic and political issues prompted
the re-traditionalization of the family as an institution that would guarantee stability
and industrial growth.25 In 1936 divorce was made more diffi cult and the themes of
strong family ties and the joys of motherhood became prominent. However, the new
family policies from the 1930s and 1940s off ered additional protection and increased
fi nancial benefi ts to mothers.
Postwar legislation went even further to strengthen the family, which was now
considered a reproduction unit to compensate for the USSR’s losses. The 1944 edict
introduced a compulsory court procedure for all divorces and raised state fees (to
two thousand rubles). Claiming paternity for illegitimate children was prohibited as
well in 1944.26 The state started a wide-scale campaign against divorce: divorced peo-
ple could not expect promotion, information about divorces was published in local
newspapers, and divorces o en became the subject of local Young Communist League
(Komsomol) and party meetings. The stigmatization of divorce and divorced people
was very hard on women and made it even less possible to seek a divorce in a situation
of abuse. Stalin’s death in 1953 did not bring relief in family law. Repressive policies
to compel spouses to live together at any cost continued and were fi nally codifi ed in
1969 with the introduction of the new family code. This law brought back the possibil-
ity of obtaining a divorce in the registry offi ce (ZAGS) for spouses who did not have
children or who had adult children and did not have any property disputes. However,
all other cases had to be brought before a court, which had to inquire into the reasons
for the requested divorce and granted it only in the case of an irrevocable breakup of
family life. At the same time, it was now possible to claim paternity and child support
for illegitimate children.27
That the family became a public institution and was no longer the locus of eco-
nomic and educational socialization for its members was obvious from the new Soviet
criminal legislation that removed all mention of family ties, either as aggravating or
mitigating circumstances in commi ing a crime. Soviet criminal codes no longer in-
cluded crimes against the family or other similar off enses, treating all citizens equally,
notwithstanding their marital status. The pre-1917 law included provisions for sev-
eral types of crimes to protect the family union and the physical integrity of fam-
ily members. Part XI of vol. XV (Criminal Law) of the Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii
(Compendium of Laws of the Russian Empire, 1912 edition) regulated the “crimes
96 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
against family rights,” as it called them. Art. 1583 explicitly stated that for ba ering
a wife, infl icting harm on her body, or the torture of a wife the perpetrator should re-
ceive a punishment that was two degrees higher than that for the same acts commi ed
against an unrelated person (mostly the deprivation of the rank and social status and
penal labor in Siberia for six to ten years). A wife who abused her husband or children
who abused their parents would receive the same punishment. Art. 1451 stated that
the murder of a wife, a husband, parents, grandparents, children, or other relatives
was to be punished similarly to a repeat murder, that is, by the deprivation of all rights
and a sentence of penal labor in Siberia for life. The same article found the killing of an
illegitimate newborn by its mother a mitigating circumstance and punished it by six
years of imprisonment.28
Soviet criminal law did not distinguish between relatives and other citizens, prob-
ably promoting the idea that in a communist society everybody is related to the same
degree and blood kinship should not ma er more than social connections. Therefore,
kinship ceased to be an aggravating circumstance that invoked harsher punishment.
However, the disappearance of an explicit prohibition of spousal abuse was read by
some men as a license to use physical force. A long legal tradition had distinguished
between relatives and other people and many may have interpreted this new law as
only prohibiting the abuse of other people, not family members.
The new criminal codes (1922 and 1926) off ered some protection for abused
women. Art. 142 (136 in the 1926 code) punished murder with no less than eight years
in prison with strict isolation. This article specifi ed in point (a) that if the murder was
connected with jealousy and other “base instincts,” it was possible to punish spouses
who killed their partners (compare this to art. 143/137 that punished for murder with-
out aggravating circumstances with only a three-year imprisonment). Art. 144/138
punished murder commi ed “under the infl uence of strong disquietude, caused by
illegal violence or grave insult by the victim” with a sentence of less than three years.
This article covered murders in which spouses killed in self-defense or in the heat of
passion. Technically, art. 144/138 punished crimes of passion. Infanticide did not re-
ceive a special article (it reappeared in 1996 with the fi rst post-Soviet criminal code): all
fi licides (killing of children by their parents) and infanticides went under art. 142/136
point (e), which punished the murder of a person in “a helpless state” with respect to
neonaticides (killing newborns), or point (d), which punished the murder of a person
under the “special care” of the perpetrator.29
The code of 1960, however, reconfi gured art. 142/136. Being created in a situa-
tion of an acute need for criminal law reform, it added another set of aggravating
circumstances. Art. 102 in the new edition ceased to include jealousy or base instincts;
instead it added murder commi ed as a result of hooliganism, that is, disruptive and
disorderly conduct. The punishment was also much harsher: between eight and fi een
years in prison, or the death penalty. The so-called simple murder (art. 103) was pun-
ished by three to ten years of imprisonment. However, crimes of passion remained in
art. 104, which was amended to include calculated consequences: now it read “murder
commi ed under the infl uence of strong disquietude, caused by illegal violence or
grave insult by the victim, if these actions resulted in or could result in grave conse-
quences for the accused or his relatives.”30 Therefore the code introduced the notion
BYTOVUKHA 97
of hooliganism as a possible cause of domestic murders, together with the fi nal quali-
fi cation of jealousy and self-defense of a spouse as a crime of passion. Hooliganism
was a very convenient motive because it did not require any additional explanation.
Criminologists pointed out that “it is a very special motive. It does not have any ‘obvi-
ous’ reason, which would explain its origin and criminal actions.” Hooliganism was
o en seen as “senseless, irrational, mean,”31 and was considered a perfectly suitable
explanation of family violence.
The block of assaults included all types of injuries and physical abuse of various
degrees (from aggravated to light). It also included art. 157 (in the 1922 code), which
punished premeditated hi ing, beating, or other assault that infl icted physical pain
with forced labor or imprisonment for the term of one year; if it resulted in torture
then it was punished with imprisonment for two years with strict isolation. The 1926
code (art. 146) changed the punishment to six months of forced labor or a fi ne for as-
sault and a three-year imprisonment for torture.32 The 1960 code divided art. 146 into
two new articles—art. 112 (premeditated light physical assault or beating) and art. 113
(torture). These were punished by six-month to one-year-imprisonments or a fi ne, or
by measures of social discipline.33
These changes in the Soviet criminal law were closely connected with the Soviet
interpretation of the Marxist theory of crime. According to Marx, crime is the mani-
festation of class antagonisms. With the abolition of classes under socialism, it was
believed that all crime should vanish. Although crime did not vanish in the Soviet
Union, the state pretended that the number of robberies, murders, and other violent
crime by Soviet citizens was much lower than in the capitalist West. Strict gun control,
the threat of harsh punishment, the omnipotent police, and the low incidence of drug
abuse largely accounted for the lower crime rate.34
Soviet sources indicated that between 80 and 85 percent of all violent crimes were
commi ed under the infl uence of alcohol and usually involved family members, close
friends, or neighbors (see table 6 below).35 According to Soviet law, commi ing a crime
under the infl uence of alcohol was not a mitigating but an aggravating factor. Alcohol
abuse was the primary cause of almost three-fourths of all divorces (see table 4 below).36
Overcrowded housing conditions combined with alcohol abuse o en resulted in family
violence. This simplistic causation model was fi rmly embedded in the minds of Soviet
criminologists, who believed that crime could only be reduced by harshening punish-
ments and by strengthening prevention policies, as I will discuss in detail below.
The Concept of Hooliganism and Family Violence
The legal changes refl ected the authorities’ concern over the situation with domes-
tic violence: connecting it with hooliganism, traditionally a public off ense or off ense
against the public order, the Soviet state tried to turn a private space behind closed
doors into a public area of socialist action. Since the family was viewed as a microcosm
of socialist society, the rules applicable to the public order were considered adequate
for the domestic sphere as well.
The wide concern about hooliganism started with a 1926 crime in the Chubarov al-
ley where a woman was gang-raped by a group of men, some of whom were members
98 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
of the Young Communist League. Up to the mid-1930s, hooligans continued to repre-
sent the worst politically unconscious elements of Soviet society.37 Earlier, in 1924, the
presidium of the Moscow Council had called for a fi ght against hooliganism among
children and teenagers, which prompted the All-Russian Central Executive Commit-
tee (VTsIK) to revise the 1922 criminal code article on hooliganism and to allow the
prosecution of some cases under administrative procedure. The Chubarov alley inci-
dent facilitated quick and prompt revisions. In the new, 1926 version, art. 176 defi ned
hooliganism as “mischievous actions in connection with manifest disrespect to society,
rampage and outrage,” removing such qualifying aspects as “senseless” and “disre-
spect to individual citizens.”38 Through these changes hooliganism became an off ense
against the public order. Hooliganism had originally been reserved for teenagers and
young men, because of their supposedly unstable psychology and developing mascu-
linity.39 However, many understood hooliganism as also an off ense against the rules
of socialist society, which made it possible to apply the concept to a variety of acts,
such as brawling, drinking, and fi ghting (also when such happened inside private
apartments).
The debate on hooliganism in the domestic sphere started with the People’s Com-
missariat of Municipal Services of the RSFSR (Narkomkhoz) and the People’s Commis-
sariat of Justice of the RSFSR (Narkomiust) launching a joint debate over (un)cultured
living, in the a ermath of the 1935 circular on criminalizing misbehavior in communal
apartments. The circular announced that the pathologies common to communal life,
such as noisy drinking bouts and violent arguments, would now be considered hoo-
liganism.40 It immediately ran into determined opposition from high-ranking mem-
bers of the Soviet judiciary. The Supreme Court of the USSR included a number of
vocal critics of the Narkomiust/Narkomkhoz circular. By enabling legal offi cials to
read hooliganism into everyday domestic dramas, the court worried that the circular
had made hooliganism into a catch-all category and obscured the meaning of a crime
notorious for its opaqueness, elasticity, and ambiguity. The court would defi ne hoo-
liganism as a crime that took place only in public places. Finally, the court in its 1939
resolution asserted that crimes such as “beatings” and “insults” could be prosecuted
as hooliganism only if their “goal” was to “display explicit disrespect for society and
not when their motives [were] connected with the personal relationships between the
guilty party and the victim.”41
The permission to prosecute domestic off enders as hooligans facilitated the state’s
presence in the private spaces of Soviet citizens. At the same time prosecution for hoo-
liganism was sped up and this probably explains the willingness of law enforcement
to use this particular charge. A special order of the People’s Commissariat of Justice
of the USSR provided guidelines for summary justice in 1940. First, it permi ed send-
ing a case to the people’s court immediately if a hooligan was caught on the scene of
the crime. When he was charged separately, the order insisted on the use of pretrial
investigation “only if necessary.” The arrested hooligan was sent to the people’s court
with a protocol from the scene of the crime in which a militia offi cer included brief
and concise information about the events, the accused, and the names and addresses
of witnesses. Second, the courts had to rule on a case within two days from receiving
the case fi le. Third, the sentence had to be executed immediately, with no right of ap-
BYTOVUKHA 99
peal. Finally, the documents designated special courts for dealing with hooliganism
charges only.42 For the local law enforcement agencies charges of hooliganism became
a frequent remedy against abusive family members and an eff ective deterrence tool to
bring people to order.
The interpretation of hooliganism by criminologists, however, continued to stick
to the public nature of the off ense. Moreover, the late 1950s and 1960s witnessed the
rollback of the public paradigm of hooliganism. The Great Patriotic War and rise of
crime right a er the war called for decisive and eff ective measures to regain offi cial
control over the Soviet population. Men (and women) returned as heroes from the
war and expected a certain leniency from the authorities when it came to drinking
and debauching. A er Stalin’s death and the subsequent broad amnesty of all sorts of
criminals, crime rates rapidly increased (by 30 percent by 1958), which made authori-
ties revise criminal law and a itudes toward criminal policy.43 During this time, local
law enforcement offi cials were trying and convicting a growing number of domestic
hooligans despite the central orders aimed at curbing this practice. Local militia of-
fi cers used the concept of hooliganism as the simplest way to ensure public order and
return amnestied criminals, many of whom were domestic abusers, back to prison.
Local militia considered it important to prosecute using the summary justice allowed
in the case of hooliganism rather than to start a criminal investigation that required
much more evidence and investigation for its pretrial phase.
Soviet criminologists of the 1950s and 1960s found themselves in a diffi cult situa-
tion. By the data they provided in their research they supported the law enforcement
perspective on hooliganism, but their loyalties had to lie with the Supreme Court and
high-ranking judiciary, who saw hooliganism as a fi rst step in a criminal career. Thus
the prominent Soviet criminologist Alexei Adolfovitch Gertsenzon (1902–1970), giv-
ing statistics for hooliganism for 1966, noted that 41 percent of all crimes took place
in the living quarters (zhiloe pomeshchenie), with 33 percent in communal apartments;
62 percent of crimes happened during workdays. It was he who found a compromise
between the public and the private: the object of hooliganism, he insisted, was not
only the public order but also the rules of socialist society, which meant that break-
ing these rules could happen anywhere, including the family. Therefore 66 percent of
the victims knew their assailant: 25 percent were spouses and 6 percent were other
relatives, which suggested that hooliganism included domestic violence in half of the
cases.44
A typical criminal case prosecuted as hooliganism happened in 1965 in Barnaul.
Iakovlev, a Barnaul worker, commi ed systematic hooliganism and tortured his part-
ner, Ignat’eva, during a period of ten months. He publicly ba ered her, hit her with a
hot poker, once tried to push her into the hot stove in front of her daughter, made her
undress and swim in early spring, tied her to the cross in a local cemetery, and threw
her down into the water from a bridge. Ignat’eva and her neighbors complained to the
local militia several times. The militia offi cers sent her to the medical and forensic ex-
aminations and advised her to submit a complaint under art. 112 (premeditated light
physical assault or beating), which required private accusation and allowed reconcili-
ation. It is quite diffi cult to qualify Iakovlev’s actions as “light physical assault,” but
the local militia was very resistant to bringing more serious charges against him. A er
100 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
Ignat’eva’s daughter complained about his behavior, the militia defi ned his actions
as minor hooliganism under the code of administrative off enses and he was fi ned.
Finally, he brutally murdered Ignat’eva.45
It was such severe cases that revealed the failure of applying the concept of hoo-
liganism to domestic abuse. Criminologists grew more and more critical of law en-
forcement and pushed the Supreme Court to clarify what constituted hooliganism.
The 1966 edict of the Supreme Court’s Presidium once more defi ned hooliganism as
“premeditated actions crudely disturbing the public order and expressing manifest
disrespect to society.” The punishment was one-year imprisonment or the same term
of forced labor, or a fi ne of fi y rubles (changed to two hundred in 1982).46 In 1972, the
Supreme Court in a decision on court practice explained that insults and assault against
relatives within the family or the apartment were crimes against a person, not hooli-
ganism, and could be qualifi ed as the la er only if they threatened the public order.
It further warned against the wide interpretation of hooliganism.47 The judiciary thus
once again distinguished between public and private, while seeing hooliganism as the
cause of further criminal behavior. These decisions also pushed criminologists who
provided the theoretical background for law enforcement to clarify the corpus delicti
of hooliganism and crimes against a person.48 Furthermore, policing hooliganism be-
came an essential part of new prevention policies, especially directed at teenagers.49
Reducing domestic violence to hooliganism allowed the Soviet state to reinforce
the concept of order and make people submit to certain universal rules of socialist be-
havior. It also provided simple policy explanations and decisions as to how to combat
domestic violence: dealing with alcohol dependence and improving living arrange-
ments should have solved the problem. When they did not, criminologists had to come
up with other explanatory frameworks, which would continue the “byt” understand-
ing of domestic abuse but suggest other remedies to deal with it.50
The concepts of “byt” and “semeino-bytovye prestupleniia” (family-domestic crimes)
By the late 1960s, Soviet criminologists came up with a new concept, that of semeino-
bytovye (family-domestic) crimes, reviving the concept of “byt” in the criminal sphere.
In the 1920s and 1930s the adjective “bytovoi” was o en used to describe everyday life
practices, those happening mostly among close relatives or friends and o en within
the same living arrangements. The criminologists thought they had found an ideal
concept that refl ected the very nature of these crimes: they were commi ed by family
members against each other within the same house and for obvious motives—domes-
tic quarrels or alcohol consumption. In 1970 the Ministry of Internal Aff airs issued a
special instruction to start counting these off enses under the category of “semeino-by-
tovye” (family-domestic) and since then all off enses between family members residing
together have been qualifi ed as such. By the mid-1980s, criminologists ascertained that
the majority of violent crimes were commi ed as a result of family confl icts. A signifi -
cant proportion of these crimes (40 percent) included murders and grievous bodily
harm between family members and neighbors.51
Some Soviet criminologists defi ned family-domestic crimes by their motivation.
In their opinion, they were always rooted in the so-called bytovye motives. However,
BYTOVUKHA 101
other criminologists dismissed this position and insisted that there were no specifi c
“bytovye motives” in human behavior; even jealousy could not be qualifi ed as such.
Moreover, they believed that hooliganism played an essential role in these crimes.52
Some other authors thought that family-domestic crimes were those that happened in
places belonging to the “byt” sphere; yet others took “bytovye” confl icts as the major
defi ning factor.53 This confusion over the defi nition and motives of such crimes reveals
confl icting trends in the 1970s and 1980s: while criminal statistics a ested to a grow-
ing rate of violence within the family and domestic sphere, criminologists could not
agree on the cause and motives of these crimes. They unanimously accepted they were
part of the “byt,” the “sphere of everyday life of the people and relations outside of the
production sphere, dependent on social and economic conditions and material and
technical foundations of a given society. Its goal is to satisfy the historically grounded
material and cultural needs of the members of a given society.”54 This typical Soviet
defi nition was always cited by criminologists before going into the labyrinth of the
criminological characteristics of violence within the family and domestic sphere. This
implicit understanding, however, provided some consistency as criminologists, de-
spite their diff erences, mostly talked about the same thing: criminal acts of family
members against each other, o en at home, sometimes in public places (such as a
workplace or a street).55
The framework of family-domestic crimes was so convenient that it fi rmly estab-
lished itself in post-Soviet criminology and acquired subfi elds such as family criminol-
ogy, whose proponent, D. A. Shestakov, claimed to have created “a ground-breaking
omnipotent semantic concept of criminal causation,” which, he argued, off ered a
unique and more thorough concept of domestic violence than feminist concepts. In
his opinion, domestic violence was essentially caused by confl icts between men and
women and the absence of skills to solve them. Once people knew how to deal with
these issues (that is, once women understood the complicated male psychology and
men’s essential, biologically rooted aggressiveness and accepted these as a given), the
level of crime within the family would immediately drop.56 This was a logical develop-
ment of the concept of “semeino-bytovye” (family-domestic) crimes, originally relying
on such “social” causes as alcoholism and personal diff erences.
Sociologists who worked on the problems of byt supported the concept of fam-
ily-domestic crimes and developed a new fi eld of family-confl ict resolution studies.
Following the authorities’ concern about the instability of the family and high divorce
rates, these scholars a empted to come up with more complicated explanations of the
causes and results of confl icts. In the 1970s, sociologists were the fi rst to carefully touch
upon the problem of power relations in the family and make connections between
women’s double burden and the contradictions of offi cial gender equality discourses
as leading to dissatisfaction and confl icts within the Soviet family.57 However, the most
long-lived concept resulting from the collective eff orts of sociologists, criminologists,
and psychologists was that of the neblagopoluchnaia sem’ia (problem family). It provided
explanations for juvenile delinquency, criminal behavior, and demographic problems.
Those families in which parents were alcoholics, abused their children, quarreled, did
not pay suffi cient a ention to their off spring, relied too much on school to educate
them, and/or were more concerned with their own lives, were marked as problem-
102 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
atic.58 Single mothers struggling to earn a living, large families (with more than three
children), young families with children (especially in the cases of parents younger
than twenty), divorced mothers with children, and families with disabled children or
family members—all of them ended up in the category of “neblagopoluchnye.” More-
over, any family could potentially end up as a problem family, for example, as a result
of divorce.
In response to the perceived problem of the “neblagopoluchnaia” family, the Soviet
authorities widely mobilized educators, sociologists, doctors, and law enforcement of-
fi cers to develop preventive policies aimed at controlling such families. Soviet popular
magazines of the 1970s and 1980s started a large campaign to highlight the problems
of such families in the context of saving and protecting children and preventing ju-
venile crime. Thus Chelovek i Zakon (Man and law), a popular magazine published
by the Ministry of Justice, had material on juvenile crime (including hooliganism) in
every issue since 1970 until the post-Soviet time. Like a mirror, this magazine refl ected
the authorities’ and policy makers’ concerns and priorities. Journalist Tatiana Kopylo-
va’s article of 1971 described the situation in one of the juvenile correctional facilities
(VTK). She focused on teenagers who were between fourteen and eighteen years old
and recounted stories shared by the inmates. All of them came from problem families:
the majority of teenagers mentioned some sort of domestic violence (mostly beating).
From her conversation with the head of the juvenile correctional facility one can see
the offi cial point of view that, although the inmates came from all social groups, many
of them were from divorced families. A sixteen-year-old inmate convicted of rape de-
scribed his path to crime: he came from a family with a disabled father. His mother was
a housewife (she obviously did not work to take care of her husband), so they survived
on his disability pension and what his nineteen-year-old sister earned. The inmate did
not remember anything positive from his childhood: his father drank, abused them,
and kicked them out of their home in the middle of the night; they waited on the street
for him to allow them back in. Then the young man started drinking himself, joined
a gang of hooligans, and ended up raping a girl “out of curiosity.”59 Drinking fathers
and mothers, who lived off disability or child benefi ts (in the cases of large families)
and ignored their children, had to take the blame for the rise of juvenile delinquency
in the country. However, the magazine did not off er any sustainable prevention policy
except for the regular warning “do not forget to inform the proper authorities when
you see the fi rst marks of abuse.”60 The authors and lawyers carefully avoided the
subject of domestic abuse against women, which in their opinion was irrelevant to the
whole “save our children” project.
Family Violence: Abusing the Beloved?
The Russian family has always been a violent institution.61 The levels of abuse re-
ported to the authorities leave no illusions about the gender hierarchy and discrimi-
nation against women within the Soviet household either. Various sources, such as
private documents, memoirs, literature, and folklore, corroborate criminal statistics
and show that criminal punishment was not enough to abolish family violence. The
BYTOVUKHA 103
fundamentally modern Soviet ideology failed to penetrate traditional forms of every-
day relations between family members. Men continued to abuse those they thought
were subordinate. No comrade courts, Party reprimands, or criminal prosecutions
could change the situation, I believe, mostly because family violence was the quintes-
sence of the acceptance of violence as a means of confl ict resolution and control, both
by the state and by society.
Of the diff erent forms of family violence, I will focus on two main types—domestic
abuse (ba ering) and intrafamily killings—for comparative reasons in the following
discussion. Together these forms make it possible to highlight vertical and horizontal
violence and draw conclusions about how violence functioned as a tool of coercion
and control. The typical percentages of killings within families, given by criminolo-
gists for the 1970s, included 64 percent for spousal murders (58 percent for wife mur-
der and 8 percent for husband murder), 20 percent for child murder, 13 percent for
parricide (including in-laws), and 1 percent for other relatives.62 These fi gures paint a
typical picture of family abuse.
Domestic Violence: Battering and Beating
As mentioned earlier, domestic violence was visible in the Soviet mass media and
criminal literature. It was defi nitely part of the everyday life and experiences of many
women and men in the Soviet Union. However, there are no adequate data on the
incidents of domestic violence because these statistics were not offi cially collected
before 1970, so we can only rely on indirect indicators. The main body of data here
comes from sociological research on the reasons for divorce and the popular new
fi eld of family confl ict studies that slowly emerged in the 1970s. The other sources are
reported crime rates for relevant articles of the criminal codes, but these data are not
very helpful.
Tables 1–3 indicate that there was a consistent increase in the number of physical
assaults in the 1920s, and that the number dropped in the 1930s; the same trends are
present in the 1960s and 1970s (for the Belorussian data). At the same time, hooligan-
ism convictions increased almost twofold, which suggests that the majority of these as-
saults were re-qualifi ed as hooliganism charges that could be considered under public
Table 1. The number of those convicted for art. 146 of the Criminal Code of 1926– premeditated
hi ing, beating, or other assault infl icting physical pain, 1925–1935* (%, 1925=100)
Year 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1935
Art. 146 100 113 123 190 176 35
* There are no consistent crime statistics for the USSR, so the tables contain fi gures that only indicate gen-
eral trends. On crime statistics see: Ger P. Van Den Berg, The Soviet System of Justice: Figures and Policy (Dor-
drecht: Martinus Nij hoff Publishers, 1985), 9–15. The number convicted only covers prosecuted crimes.
Considering the very high conviction rate in the USSR, the fi gure indeed refl ects the majority of registered
crimes, but not those incidents that the authorities refused to register. Art. 146 required private prosecu-
tion, which means that the latency for this crime might be quite high.
Source: M. D. Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia protiv zhizni i zdorov’ia [Crimes against life and health] (Moscow:
Iuridicheskoe izd-vo MIu SSSR, 1947), 30–31.
104 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
prosecution. The diminishing number of cases of private complaints (they decreased
ten times between 1958 and 1974 in Belorussia) also suggests that women would rarely
complain due to a variety of reasons, including the inability and probably unwilling-
ness to carry the burden of proof. If we compare these data with the private complaints
in rape cases, it is obvious that the prosecution of domestic violence through private
complaints did not work. At the same time, the charge of hooliganism eased convic-
tion and the increase in hooliganism rates probably indicated that law enforcement
offi cials tried to fi nd ways to deal with domestic violence under the existing criminal
law, rather than not to prosecute at all or to suggest reforms. However, integrating
domestic abuse in the vast body of other assaults and avoiding statistical analysis and
public discussion played an important role in strengthening the ideology of a success-
ful socialist project.
Table 4 below provides rather diff erent and sca ered data, but is still quite tell-
ing. The fi rst divide is that between the city and the countryside: while in Leningrad
a quarter of women decided to single out domestic abuse as a separate reason for di-
vorce, in Grodno region only 5.6 percent did, probably because women there ascribed
cruelty to the side-eff ects of alcohol abuse or distinguished only those types of cruelty
which they found absolutely unacceptable. However, women universally mentioned
domestic violence in the family. At the same time, sociologists carefully avoided ana-
lyzing “cruelty” or “immoral behavior,” as they called it in their books. Devoting a
great deal of a ention to alcoholism, sociologists helped to construct the same causa-
tion of domestic violence as criminologists had done: alcohol abuse led to other forms
of abuse and was the source of all domestic and hooliganism crimes; combating alco-
holism as a crime-prevention policy became the slogan of many prevention campaigns
as well as temperance movements in the 1970s and 1980s.
Table 2. The number of those convicted upon private accusation (including rape and art. 146),
1929–1933 (%, 1929=100)
Year 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933
Private acc. 100 50.6 26.9 16.9 6.5
Source: Van Den Berg, Soviet System of Justice, 279.
Table 3. The number of those convicted upon private accusation (art. 112) and hooliganism,
Belorussia, 1958–1974 (%, 1961=100)
Year
Private accusation art. 112 Private accusation rape Hooliganism
thousands trend thousands trend thousands trend
1958 22 100
1961 1.3 100 15.1 100
1966 10 28 1.1 72 24.4 174
1970 8 25 1.4 134 24.5 202
1974 2 10 1.6 169 21.1 192
Source: Van Den Berg, Soviet System of Justice, 329, data from table 139.
BYTOVUKHA 105
Obtaining a divorce on the grounds of domestic abuse was not easy before the new
family code of 1969. It was costly and there was strict control over the right to divorce
in order “to prevent abuses” of this right.63 First-instance courts rarely checked the va-
lidity of information provided by the spouses, particularly by women, and dismissed
cases following the policy of strengthening the family, especially a er the war. Thus in
the 1949 divorce case, T. insisted that her husband physically abused her a er return-
ing home from the army and cheated on her, which made it impossible to continue
“previous spousal relationships.” The fi rst-instance court dismissed her accusations. It
was only the Supreme Court that checked all the facts with the reluctant help of local
law enforcement and granted the divorce.64
Ge ing a divorce and fi nancial support for children seemed to be a be er strat-
egy for women than criminal prosecution. Following the deeply ingrained traditional
“breadwinner” ideology, which made women reluctant to risk losing the primary in-
come of their family, many of them a empted to use the comrades’ courts or local
Party commi ees or ask the militia to give a warning to or to arrest their abusers for
twenty-four hours or some other short period, but not to send them to prison, unless
the abuse could not be tolerated.65 Warnings, however, had li le eff ect on the behavior
of abusers as in the case of Sh., a twenty-nine-year-old unemployed man. He received
three warnings from the militia and the court and then was convicted of hooliganism
and sentenced to two years in prison in the 1960s. Finally he stabbed his wife, “out of
distaste for her,” as he explained to the court.66
The comrades’ courts and local Party bureaus were other semilegal options women
could use to restrain domestic abusers. Moreover, these substitutes of offi cial courts
would have been closer to the traditional ways of dealing with family abuse, because
Table 4. Domestic violence as a reason for divorce (sociological data), USSR, 1964–1976
Author Kurganov Solov’ev Korolev/
Chechot Chechot Kolokol’chikov
Region Leningrad Latvian SSR Leningrad Leningrad Grodno region
Year 1964–1965 1970 1973 1976 1970–1973
No. of
respondents
or cases
1000 1000 1000 1000 637
Alcohol abuse 29.2% 16%
(immoral
behavior in
the family)
38.1%
(immoral
behavior,
alcoholism)
21.5% 44.3
Domestic
violence
26.6% 16.6% 5.6 (cruelty)
Sources: I. A. Kurganov, Sem’ia v SSSR. 1917–1967 [Family in the USSR.1917–1967] (Frankfurt-on-Main:
Possev-Verlag, 1967), 185–186; N. Solov’ev, “Razvod, ego faktory, prichiny, povody” [Divorce, its factors,
reasons, causes], in Problemy byta, braka, sem’i [The problems of everyday life, marriage, family], ed. N.
Solov’ev (Vilnius: Mintis, 1970), 123; D. M. Chechot, Molodezh i brak (zametki iurista) [The youth and mar-
riage (notes of a lawyer)] (Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1976), 90–91; Iu. A. Korolev,
Brak i razvod: Sovremennye tendentsii [Marriage and divorce: Contemporary trends] (Moscow: Iuridiches-
kaia literature, 1978), 142; V. T. Kolokol’chikov, “Brachno-semeinye otnosheniia v srede kolkhoznogo
krest’ianstva” [Marriage and family relations in the context of collective farmers], Sotsiologicheskie issledo-
vaniia [Sociological studies] 3 (1976): 82.
106 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
before 1917 these cases would go to the volost’ (rural district) courts for peasants and
local consistory courts for the majority of the population.67 The comrades’ courts were
specifi cally created to relieve the congestion in the courts, a goal especially achieved
in the fi eld of civil disputes and criminal cases fi led upon private accusation,68 that is,
light physical abuse under art. 146.1. The comrades’ courts together with other social
courts (such as village courts) continued the tradition of dealing with local ma ers in
a semilegal manner as a negotiating body between the community and the authori-
ties.69 In the 1920s and 1930s, a quarter of all crimes discussed in the comrades’ courts
were crimes against a person, while in the 1970s 12 percent of all crimes were those
of so-called immoral behavior, including sexual misbehavior and domestic violence
(in addition to 20 percent of pe y hooliganism cases).70 The cases here ended up in
reprimand.
Party bureaus such as the Party control commissions performed the supervis-
ing and moral watchdog functions similar to those of pre-revolutionary ecclesiastical
courts. Sheila Fitzpatrick has provided a very useful analysis of the complaints about
Party members’ morals and behavior to the Party control commission from the 1930s
to the 1950s. This material reveals that domestic violence constituted an example of
“immoral non-communist” behavior and was inquired into and reprimanded by the
Party.71 Women, when they decided to compose a denunciation le er (donos) against
their husbands, traditionally appealed to the father fi gure—the state—to get men to
comply with the rules of conduct. It is diffi cult to decide if the donos represented a
new form of response to domestic abuse. Fitzpatrick suggests that many women de-
nounced their husbands (or ex-husbands) as “women scorned”—upset and revenge-
ful.72 As the material suggests, men did not write denunciation le ers against their
wives because they could always rely on their fi sts and other means of discipline to
deal with revolting spouses. Women, however, had a limited range of responses and
continued to use traditional means of appeal to the community and the authorities as
they had done in previous centuries because they knew that, despite all ideological
assurances to the contrary, they still lived in a patriarchal world.
Spousal Murder
Domestic violence o en preceded spousal murder, mostly the murder of a wife. Again,
the typical criminal chronicle would suggest that husbands killed their wives unpre-
meditatedly. Thus P. killed his wife when drunk, stabbing her in the heat of a quarrel.
B. stabbed his wife when drunk and then grievously injured his son who tried to in-
tervene and protect his mother. M. tried to kill his wife by ba ering her with his fi sts
and a wrench.73 These stories are endless. They all a est to the high level of domestic
violence and the great likelihood of domestic abuse ending in lethal violence. Many
of these murders were prosecuted under art. 102(b) of the criminal code as a result of
hooliganism, i.e., based on the understanding that domestic violence would be caused
by hooliganism. Criminologists, however, continued to point to jealousy, revenge, and
the heat of passion as major motives for spousal killings. Their socio-criminological
study of cases from diff erent regions (mostly from the 1970s and 1980s) suggested the
following list of motives: self-assertion (in connection with hooliganism), the intention
BYTOVUKHA 107
to get rid of problems (mostly for women), the intention to keep the partner, and jeal-
ousy (mostly for men).74 Murders for fi nancial gain were rare but not unheard of.
Men killed their wives for various reasons: because of jealousy, because of desire
for another woman, because they were too educated or not educated enough, because
they were women.75 They received a routine punishment in the form of prison sen-
tences of diff erent lengths under criminal law. I mentioned earlier that Soviet criminal
law also contained a special article (138/104), punishing murder in the heat of passion
(sil’noe dushevnoe volnenie), which had to be provoked by illegal violence or grave insult
by the victim. If proven it could be a mitigating circumstance for the fi nal punishment.
It was suggested that this article be reserved for women who killed their abusers in
self-defense, provoked by the abuser’s behavior. Criminologists characterized victims
of this type of murder as exhibiting mostly negative behavior and having previous
administrative or criminal convictions and/or reprimands (77 percent). Eighty-seven
percent of victims were drunk at the moment of their murder.76 Men accounted for
Table 5. Family homicides in pre-revolutionary Russia, 1880–1913 (thousands)
Year
All
homicides Parricide
Murder of spouses
and other relatives Infanticide
1880 600 18 (3%)1145 (24.2%) 46 (7.7%) 1
1890 640 19 (3%) 1174 (27.2%) 71 (11.1%)
1900 625 27 (4.3%) 208 (33.2%) 91 (14.6%)
1910 1738 77 (4.4%) 420 (24.1%) 48 (2.7%) 1
1911 1811 75 (4.1%) 472 (26.1%) 77 (4.2%) 1
1912 1868 73 (3.9%) 471 (25.2%) 80 (4.3%) 1
1913 1844 90 (4.9%) 405 (21.9%) 96 (5.2%) 1
Source: Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia, 28–29.
Table 6. Family homicides in the USSR, 1956–1990
Year Murder as a result of hooliganism
Murder because of jealousy and
domestic quarrel
Absolute number % of all homicides Absolute number % of all homicides
1956 1879 19.5 5098 52.8
1960 2763 19.4 7073 49.6
1965 3628 26.4 8128 59.0
1970 3240 21.2 9633 63.1
1975 1951 11.1 11856 67.5
1980 2750 12.8 14896 69.5
1985 1489 7.9 11570 61.8
1990 700 2.8 7668 30.8
Sources: V. V. Luneev, Prestupnost’ XX veka. Mirovye, regional’nye i rossiiskie tendentsii [Crime of the 20th
century. World, regional and Russian tendencies] (Moscow: Wolters Kluwer, 2005), 423–424.
108 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
88.4 percent of the victims and 56 percent of them had a reputation of being hooligans
or had been accused of immoral behavior (“domestic despotism” as one criminologist
put it).77
The majority of perpetrators were also men (89.3 percent), only 10.7 percent were
women. Criminologists, however, treated this rate as a high number for women’s vio-
lent crime. They a ributed this high rate to the “specifi c situation” in which women
became much more likely to succumb to the heat of passion. With “specifi c situa-
tion” they mostly meant alcohol abuse by their husbands, physical abuse, cheating,
or humiliation. Almost 91 percent of women convicted under art. 104 in the 1960s and
1970s murdered their husbands or partners and o en their husbands’ mistresses (66.6
and 16.6 percent of victims, respectively). Almost half of these women were between
thirty-one and forty years old and married for more than fi ve years before the murder
happened, which reveals the level of their enduring patience and pa erns of long-
term abuse. At the same time, criminologists noted that male perpetrators did not
experience any trauma and mostly killed their wives because of their cheating. Half
of the people killed by men were neighbors or coworkers (mostly other men) while
women almost exclusively killed their spouses.78
Men o en used “the heat of passion” defense when they murdered their spouses,
like in the following example. U. returned home very late and drunk. He found that
his apartment’s door was locked and immediately suspected his wife of being with a
lover. He started searching for her at the neighbors’ and assaulted a female neighbor
he met on the staircase. When he got back to his apartment he found that its door was
open and there were some men inside together with his wife and their small son. He
kicked the men out of the apartment and assaulted his wife with a knife, accusing
her of having sex with these men. He then started on his son who was crying. A male
neighbor came to the rescue and managed to grab the child from U., who continued
his actions against the neighbor. Other neighbors came in and wrestled him down.
The lower court convicted U. of infl icting grave bodily harm “in the heat of passion”
(art. 110). However, the prosecutor argued that U.’s behavior had not been sudden.
He had systematically abused his wife before, so the prosecution appealed the ver-
dict to the Supreme Court, which reversed it.79 The very fact that the fi rst-instance
court almost automatically qualifi ed U.’s actions as “aff ekt” due to his wife’s suspected
adultery characterizes the court’s a itude toward gender relations, highlighting very
traditional ideas of male and female behavior.
Women killed in self-defense, which was widely recognized by the courts and
their decisions. Thus in the case of N. who strangled her husband to protect her son
the court qualifi ed her actions as self-defense (under art. 105), but at the same time
pointed out that she was in a heat-of-passion state. Her husband T. came home drunk
and started threatening his wife and son; he also assaulted N. The son intervened to
protect his mother and was badly beaten. Fearing for her son’s life, N. grabbed strips
of her husband’s scarf and started pulling them towards herself, thus strangling the
husband.80 In another case, from 1946, G. shot her husband a er he badly assaulted
her and announced that he had decided to live with another woman.81
Jealousy o en became a motive for crimes of passion. However, criminologists
and courts were very careful not to make an automatic connection. Adultery has been
BYTOVUKHA 109
a stable motive for spousal murder for a long time. Both husbands and wives appealed
to adultery, either real or suspected, as a valid (in their eyes) justifi cation of lethal vio-
lence. Thus U. caught his wife and her lover in the bathhouse having sex. The lover
fl ed from the scene, while the wife refused to go home and stayed in the bathhouse.
When U. returned to the bathhouse several hours later, he again found her with her
lover: this time U. stabbed both of them.82 That adultery was a mitigating circumstance
is clear from the case of Sh., who killed his wife because she cheated on him. Sh. had
two previous convictions, but the court found his “specifi c life situation” excusable
and sentenced him to eight years of imprisonment instead of the twelve to fi een years
that were the usual sanction.83
Domestic abuse of women and spousal killings reveal traditional pa erns of dis-
crimination against women. Despite the new social order and the diff erent value sys-
tem, women continued to remain the main victims of domestic violence. Although the
Soviet state was concerned with the situation, it never allowed any explanatory mod-
els outside of the “byt” and “remnants of the past” paradigms in combination with
a situational approach (alcoholism and hooliganism). To see whether women were
singled out as victims one needs to look at other types of intrafamily killings such as
fi licide, parricide, and fratricide to examine hierarchical relations and modes of power
in the Soviet family.
Filicide
Filicides or murders of children by their parents were by all accounts less frequent than
spousal murders (see tables 6 and 7). The offi cial Soviet rhetoric protected children
and condemned physical violence as a disciplining method.84 However, by the 1970s
the cause of juvenile delinquency was still seen in alcoholism and domestic abuse in
families, qualifi ed as “neblagopoluchnye.” At the same time, the physical disciplining
of children, especially all types of spanking and fl ogging (typically with a belt), was
not considered serious or unacceptable. It was only when “abuse” took place, that is,
when there were visible physical injuries (bruises, broken bones, or death) that the
authorities would prosecute.85 As pointed out earlier, Soviet criminal law did not have
any specifi c corpus delicti for child abuse or infanticide, so these crimes were qualifi ed
under art. 136(d) of the 1926 code, which punished murder by a person who had the
victim in their “special care.” Therefore, fi licides of minor children, especially those
as a result of punishment, went under this article and constituted an aggravated cir-
cumstance of murder. This article did not apply to adult children killed by a parent
(mostly a father) in the heat of a quarrel. The 1960 code removed this point from art.
102 (murder with aggravating circumstances) and infanticides were punished under
art. 103 as murder without aggravating circumstances (if there were no other aggra-
vating circumstances such as intoxication, recidivism, or hooliganism). Filicide could
also be qualifi ed under mitigating circumstances for art. 138/104 in the heat of passion
or as a reckless murder for art. 139/105. That killing a child was not an aggravating
circumstance just reinforced traditional patriarchal power over children.86 However,
the criminal codes of most Soviet Republics (ten out of fi een), such as Ukraine, had a
special article for infanticide.87
110 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
Children, mostly boys, o en were collateral damage in domestic violence cases. Thus
B., being drunk, quarreled with his wife a er which he took their baby son and threw
him down from the balcony. The court qualifi ed his action as murder as a result of
hooliganism (an aggravated type). P. was stabbing his wife when his teenage son in-
tervened to stop him and was then stabbed as well. Both the wife and son died.88 These
cases were traditional Russian fi licides.
In the 1930s, the Soviet authorities were especially concerned with fi licides for
fi nancial reasons, that is, with fathers killing their children a er divorce in order to
avoid paying alimony. In 1935 it was reported that infanticides accounted for 11 per-
cent of all homicides and that half of the infanticides were fathers killing their chil-
dren to avoid paying child support.89 The punishment in these cases was harsh and
involved long sentences. Thus S. O. conspired with V. T. to poison S. O.’s two children
(three years and two months old, with diff erent women), which V. T. carried out “be-
cause of comradeship.” They both received ten years in prison camps.90
At the same time, Soviet criminologists continued to study and pathologize neo-
naticide (murder of a newborn infant), which they saw as a result of mental distur-
bance rather than of social conditions. Discussions of neonaticide were revived in the
1930s in connection with the 1936 ban on abortion. While in the 1920s criminologists
and offi cial authorities thought it necessary to treat neonaticide perpetrators leniently
and use “measures of improving economic and social conditions” to deal with them,91
criminologists in the 1930s insisted that in the new and be er living and economic con-
ditions, leniency for neonaticide commi ed for reasons of shame, a low cultural level,
or lack of fi nancial support was absolutely unacceptable and the punishment should
be as harsh as for any other murder.92 Yet, in 1935 almost 45 percent of women con-
victed of neonaticide motivated their actions by hard living conditions and shame.93
Despite statistics, criminologists and courts did not believe these women. In 1947,
Mikhail Shargorodskii ended the discussion by saying that “economic reasons for in-
fanticide in the USSR [were] completely annihilated” because of a recent edict order-
ing orphanages and schools to accept children if their (single) mothers wanted to leave
them there.94
Criminologists’ refusal to accept that neonaticide continued to take place due to in-
suffi cient changes in the everyday gender order and the position of women resulted in
new a empts to explain the rise in neonaticides in the 1960s and 1970s. Criminologists
a ested that infanticides comprised 55 percent of all murders commi ed by women in
1960 and 30–35 percent in the 1970s. However, this rate dropped by the mid-1980s and
stopped at 11 percent of all women murderers.95 Forensic psychiatry was called to help
with explanations of the motives and guilt. Psychiatrists agreed that women might
go through pre- and postnatal depression: they could develop psychiatric disorders
Table 7. Filicide in the USSR, 1931–1939 (%, 1931=100)
Year 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939
Filicide* 100 96.9 60.0 59.4 100 181 217 168 190
* Including neonaticides
Source: Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia, 90.
BYTOVUKHA 111
and psychosis due to somatic and endocrine disorders. N. A. Karacheva called them
“reactive conditions” in cases when women commi ed so-called extended suicides,
including killing other children, close relatives and, fi nally, themselves.96 Treating neo-
naticide as a mental condition helped to maintain the Soviet ideology of success in
the new social order and to avoid addressing questions of ongoing inequality and
discrimination.
Criminal chronicles in spe-
cialized journals of the 1970s and
1980s supported this view. The
senior investigator from Kalin-
ingrad reported a case of infanti-
cide. The body of a newborn was
found with its throat slashed in
the trash bins of the local mater-
nity ward. The medical expert
confi rmed that the infant had
been born alive and died as a re-
sult of bleeding from the wound.
The investigating team arrested
the mother eleven days a er the
discovery of the body. It was twenty-fi ve-year-old P. who served in the security unit
at one of the local factories and lived in a dorm. She explained that she had wanted to
have an abortion earlier, but the doctor refused because her pregnancy was past the
legal limit of twelve weeks. P. decided to have an illegal abortion and used the services
of a “known woman,” which cost her twenty-fi ve rubles. This woman, “babka Liusia,”
then a empted to induce a spontaneous abortion. However, the infant was born alive
and when he cried the mother, being scared that somebody in the dorm would hear it,
slashed his throat. Then she and the woman disposed of the body together. Investiga-
tors also learned that men had played quite a signifi cant role in this situation. It was the
father of the infant, G., who found the “known woman” with the help of his roommate
(at the same dorm). The woman was the roommate’s aunt. All of the people involved
were punished, but the men received only suspended sentences and the women (fi rst
of all, P., as the murderer) real sentences. The court, though, mitigated her sentence
based on her “mental state” a er the induced labor while “babka Liusia” and her niece
(who helped her) received harsher punishments for carrying out an illegal abortion.97
This case provided a typical model for other investigators. It was completed in
no time with solid evidence, confessions, and convictions. The perpetrator, a single
woman living in the dorm, was alleged to be unstable and to have become pregnant
as a result of her promiscuity. She killed her newborn in the heat of a moment fearing
that somebody would hear him cry. If she had turned for help to a medical institution,
she would have probably made a good mother (the tone of the report suggested). As
the same time, a larger picture of diffi cult circumstances emerges from this case: living
in a dormitory without any hope of an apartment, the father of the infant living in the
same dorm, his inability to work to make a living, the simple wish of both the man
and the woman not to have children. These “economic and social conditions,” which
Table 8. Neonaticide in the USSR, 1956–1990
Year Absolute number % of all homicides
1956 724 7.5
1960 835 5.9
1965 575 4.2
1970 489 3.2
1975 432 2.5
1980 397 1.8
1985 376 2.0
1990 191 0.8
Source: Luneev, Prestupnost’ XX veka, 423–424.
112 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
had ceased to exist according to offi cial state rhetoric, were persistently there as well
as self-help networks of “babkas” and other people ready to help with the problem of
unwanted pregnancies for money. In 1987, the Ministry of Health introduced the so-
called social indications, which allowed abortions between twelve and twenty-eight
weeks to women whose husbands died during pregnancy or divorced their wives,
women who were deprived of their maternal rights, women who had more than fi ve
children or disabled children, and women who got pregnant as a result of rape.98 With
this change the Soviet state fi nally recognized the previous policy’s failure.
Parricide and Male Violent Dynamics
The number of parricides increased fi vefold in the twentieth century, criminologists
a ested looking at criminal statistics (see table 5).99 In the 1920s, Soviet criminologists
pointed to parricide as a sign of the reconfi guration of family relationships or, in other
words, the break-up of family ties. However, mostly men (fathers) were killed by other
men (their sons). In the same decade, criminologists drew the a ention of the public
and policy makers to juvenile killers, many of whom killed their parents (mostly fa-
thers) in self-defense or in revenge for parental cruelty. An eleven-year-old boy, for
example, killed his father when the la er came home drunk, abused the boy’s younger
brothers and a sister, and threatened them with a hatchet; the boy managed to calm
down his father and then killed him with the same hatchet while he was asleep. Two
other boys, eight and thirteen, killed their drunken stepfather to protect themselves
and their mother from abuse.100
In the 1960s and 1970s the situation remained the same: boys o en killed their
fathers trying to protect themselves and their mothers (or younger children in the
family) from abusive and drunken fathers. Courts treated these murders with leni-
ency, taking into consideration the “diffi cult personal situation” in the cases of adult
children and the age of the off enders in the cases of minors. Ia. killed his father with a
hatchet while protecting his mother from abuse. He received a sentence of four years
in prison (lower than the minimum sentence) due to the mitigating circumstances of
the crime, a positive characterization from the vocational school he a ended, and his
immediate confession and genuine remorse.101
As family violence was growing in the 1970s and 1980s and a signifi cant number
of crimes were commi ed at home, the authorities dealt with it by means of “profi lak-
tika”—an omnipotent concept of prevention, which included a complex of social, eco-
nomic, legal, and ideological measures to make the family a be er place for children.
Criminologists focused on “individual prevention” in the 1970s with the goal to reform
the potential criminal. This was complemented with general social prevention, which
included measures for the protection of public peace, propaganda of the imminence
of punishment for crimes against a person, training citizens to respond to potentially
violent situations (especially to notify law enforcement), and general social measures
to eliminate conditions leading to hooliganism, fi ghts, and alcohol abuse.102 Every text-
book on criminology has contained a section on prevention and criminal prognostica-
tion since.103 However, gender was never a point of discussion and all participants in
the debates carefully avoided any gender and power analysis before the 1990s. Al-
BYTOVUKHA 113
though the women’s movement and NGO women’s crisis centers have a empted to
infl uence the situation, gender still has not made its way into Russian criminology or
family violence prevention policies. This culminated in the recent measures to work
with violent families to protect the human rights of children,104 carefully avoiding such
notions as gender and violence against women. Alcohol abuse and stressful external
social conditions remain the main explanations for family violence.105
Conclusions
The Soviet family experienced high levels of violence by any account. In this respect
it might be argued that it remained a traditional space for violent behavior, where
men abused women and children, that is, those who were not in a position of power.
The Soviet state, however, was alarmed by this abuse against women and a empted
to deal with it via diff erent policy measures, fi rst using law and its repressive powers
and then, when these did not work, widening the range of measures to include social
policy and ideology. In the 1930s, when policymakers realized that be er living con-
ditions and formal equality policies did not necessarily lead to the extermination of
violence in the family, they turned to traditional measures of harshening prosecution,
which simply resulted in more convictions and repeated off ending. By the 1960s the
government called upon specialists from various fi elds to provide a complex approach
to family violence. Criminologists and sociologists came up with their explanatory
models and suggested an omnipotent prevention scheme, the aim of which was the
reformation of potential off enders rather than deterrence. The prevention scheme was
based on understanding family violence as a social problem, a symptom of the “crisis”
in the family,106 but not as a result of gender discrimination and/or inequality. That
men constituted the majority of abusers was not explained as an exercise of power
or patriarchy, but rather by external factors such as alcohol abuse, bad social condi-
tions, work pressures; by personal traits such as a lack of respect for authorities and
rules; and by psychological states such as jealousy, the heat of passion, and “aff ect.”
This combination served the purpose of bringing immediate remedies to the situation
rather than thinking about fundamental concepts and long-term consequences.
While Soviet rhetoric focused on external—social and economic—conditions
which had to be changed to reform or prevent family violence, present-day offi cial
discourse in Russia recognizes these a itudes as less eff ective and instead calls for the
revival of “traditional values” to help, on a moral level, keep the family together. It is
the alleged break-up of the family that is now seen as a source of all troubles.107 The
appeal to tradition brings society back to face what the tradition actually was like. I
have shown in this article that this tradition did not include notions such as the rights
of children, respect for other family members, nonviolent confl ict resolution, or other
values that modern-day Russian authorities try to put at the heart of current protec-
tive measures. What initially seems like a contradiction, in fact, is Russia’s painful
search for paths towards modernity in the past twenty years. The state and society are
not ready to reject “traditional” ways of communication within welfare policies and
prevention ideologies, although they understand the necessity of change. These ways
114 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
functioned within the so-called Soviet gender contract between women and the state,
which supported women as mothers and provided them with benefi ts their husbands
were unable to off er. This gender contract suggested that the state acted as a husband
and associated women with the domestic sphere, which allowed the state to control the
private sphere of the family.108 Nowadays, the state continues to act as a husband and
desperately searches for alternative means to continue to control the private sphere.
The state’s obsession with control and regulation of the private and the domestic
has been historically consistent and can thus be called “traditional.” While Soviet/Rus-
sian ideologies are very good at making strict divisions and delineating spaces, they
are lost in shadow zones,109 such as family violence, which cannot be confi gured as
only public or private. The Soviet state’s a empt to qualify personal quarrels or domes-
tic abuse as hooliganism shows its tremendous eff ort to make this problematic issue
public, so that it would be visible and liable for prosecution, but the state faced sturdy
resistance from the traditional structures and gender order. The state tried to get a
license to intervene as a patriarch, but lost in the competition with real husbands.
In terms of the level and forms of violence employed, the Soviet family remained
a deeply patriarchal institution. The Soviet family continued to reproduce traditional
forms and types of violence (such as wife-ba ering, child abuse, and intrafamily kill-
ings, all under the infl uence of alcohol, alongside adultery and the fi ght for private
space in crowded communal living arrangements) but for diff erent reasons. Before
1917 the power of a husband and father was offi cially upheld by the clerical and state
ideology so they were rarely held accountable for their actions; yet, criminal law ex-
plicitly protected women against men. Under the Soviet rule, in the context of formal
equality, men continued to be the main abusers and women continued to use all avail-
able strategies to protect themselves—legal, extra-legal and criminal. Men were largely
still not held accountable for their actions. So a new form of patriarchy, what I call
“patriarchal socialism,” reigned in the Soviet family. Under patriarchal socialism men
and women were proclaimed equal, but the power of men was upheld unoffi cially by
a formal approach to gender equality, through a politics of neutrality and sameness.
Theoretically, women could strike back. Practically, they were not supposed to do so be-
cause of remaining traditional ideals of submissive and passive femininity, reaffi rmed
by a denial of prosecution in cases of domestic violence. Women in the Soviet Union
were even more essentialized than in traditional patriarchies and domestic violence
became an embedded “natural” means of power and control over gender equality.
p
About the Author
Marianna Muravyeva is an Associate Professor of Law at Herzen State Pedagogical
University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a senior researcher at the University of Hel-
sinki, Finland. She specializes in gender history, history of crime, and violence against
women in early modern Europe. She is also an editor of Aspasia: The International Year-
book of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History. Her pub-
lications include the edited volumes Shame, Blame, and Culpability: Crime and Violence
in the Modern State (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Bytovoe nasilie v istorii
rossiiskoi povsednevnosti [Everyday violence in the history of Russian daily life] (St. Pe-
BYTOVUKHA 115
tersburg: EU Press, 2012); Vina i pozor v kontekste stanovleniia evropeiskikh gosudarstv
novogo vremeni (XVI–XX vv.): sbornik statei [Guilt and shame in the context of the es-
tablishment of modern European states (sixteenth to twentieth century): Collection
of articles] (St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2011); Gendernaia istoriia: pro et
contra [Gender History: pro et contra] (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 2000), and recent articles
such as “Le viol dans les codes militaires russes de Pierre le Grand à l’Armée rouge”
[Rape in the Russian military codes from Peter the Great to the Red Army], in Viols en
temps de guerre [Rapes in the time of war], ed. Raphaëlle Blanche and Fabrice Virgili,
25–42 (Paris: Payot, 2011); and “Sexual Variations,” in Cultural History of Sexuality, vol.
4, ed. Julie Peakman, 85–106 (Berg, 2010). Email: marianna.muravyeva@gmail.com.
p
Notes
1. Sergei Dovlatov, “Solo na undervude” [Solo on underwood], h p://lib.ru/DOWLATOW/
dowlatow.txt (accessed 18 March 2013).
2. “Founder of Bohemian Moscow Club Kills, Dismembers Wife,” RIA Novosti [RIA News],
12 January 2013, h p://en.ria.ru/crime/20130112/178733471.html (accessed 18 March 2013)
3. Bytovukha (n. f.)—spoken Russian: everyday life of a person; a set of conditions, in which
the everyday life passes; established order of life; byt; police slang: 1) syphilis; 2) a crime com-
mi ed in domestic conditions. See S. A. Kuznetsov, Bol’shoi tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka [Great
defi nition dictionary of the Russian language] (St. Petersburg: Norrint, 1998), h p://kuznetsov-
dictionary.info/word/b/Btovuha-3151.html (accessed 18 March 2013)
4. “Brutal Murder Highlights Russian Domestic Violence Problem,” RIA Novosti [RIA
News], 16 January 2013, h p://en.rian.ru/crime/20130116/178800003.html (accessed 18 March
2013)
5. “Eksperty rasskazali, kak pomoch postradavshim ot nasiliia v sem’e” [Experts explained how
to help victims of domestic violence], RIA Novosti [RIA News], 24 January 2013, h p://ria.ru/
society/20130124/919579778.html (accessed 18 March 2013); “B”iet, znachit—ne liubit” [If he
beats you it means he does not love you], h p://www.oprf.ru/press/news/2012/newsitem/17969
(accessed 18 March 2013).
6. See Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Transnational Activist
Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Sally E. Merry,
Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2006); Katalin Fábián, “Introduction: The Politics of Domestic Violence
in Postcommunist Europe and Eurasia,” in Domestic Violence in Post-Communist States: Local Ac-
tivism, National Policies, and Global Forces, ed. Katalin Fábián (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2010), 1–44; Janet E. Johnson, Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), xi–xii.
7. Fábián, “Introduction,” 9–10.
8. The term “domestic violence” emerged in Russia in the 1990s and was literally translated
as “domashnee nasilie.” However, its strong feminist connotation was lost in translation and it
became a neutral notion covering both spousal and child abuse. Russian scholars and policy
makers also use other terms such as “nasilie v sem’e” (violence in the family) and “supruzhes-
koe nasilie” (spousal violence). On the terminology see I. D. Gorshkova and I. I. Shurygina,
Nasilie nad zhenami v rossiiskikh sem’iakh [Violence against women in Russian families] (Moscow:
Gorbachev-Fond, 2003), 1–8, h p://www.womenmsu.msu.ru/apendix/bookall.pdf (accessed 18
March 2013); Johnson, Gender Violence, 95–98.
116 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
9. See further Johnson, Gender Violence; Maij a Jäppinen, “Tensions between Familialism and
Feminism: Domestic Violence Frameworks in a Women’s Crisis Centre,” in Gazing at Welfare,
Gender and Agency in Post-socialist Countries, ed. Maij a Jäppinen, Meri Kulmala, and Aino Saa-
rinen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 125–144.
10. See also Wini Breaines and Linda Gordon, “The New Scholarship on Family Violence,”
Signs 8, no. 3 (1983): 490–531; Kristin L. Anderson, “Gender, Status, and Domestic Violence: An
Integration of Feminist and Family Violence Approaches,” Journal of Marriage and Family 59, no.
3 (1997): 655–669.
11. On the crisis center movement and feminist agenda see: Janet E. Johnson and Aino
Saarinen, “Twenty-fi rst Century Feminisms under Repression: Gender Regime Change and
the Women’s Crisis Center Movement in Russia,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 543–567; Janet Elise
Johnson and Aino Saarinen, “Assessing Civil Society in Putin’s Russia: The Plight of Women’s
Crisis Centers,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies no. 3 (2011): 41–52; Janet Elise Johnson
and Laura Brunell, “The New WAVE: How Transnational Feminist Networks Are Promoting
Domestic Violence Policy Reform in Postcommunist Europe and Eurasia,” in Fábián, Domestic
Violence in Post-Communist States, 261–92; Johnson, Gender Violence; Jäppinen, “Tensions between
Familialism and Feminism”; Maij a Jäppinen, “Gender Violence and Crisis Centres for Women
in Russia,” Social Work & Society 8, no. 1 (2010), h p://www.socwork.net/sws/article/view/34/88
(accessed 18 March 2013).
12. There are very few specialized articles on domestic violence in the USSR, see: Valerie
Sperling, “Rape and Domestic Violence in the USSR,” Response to the Victimization of Women and
Children 13, no. 3 (1990): 16–22; Sharon Horne, “Domestic Violence in Russia,” American Psychol-
ogist 54, no. 1 (1999): 55–61. Lisa Semenoff wrote a Master’s thesis on violence against women in
the USSR: “The Women’s Movement and the Responses to Violence against Women in the USSR
and Post-Soviet Russia” (MA thesis, Carleton University, 1997). Sharon Kowalsky has been
conducting a research project on domestic violence in revolutionary Russia: “‘The More You
Beat Your Wife, the Tastier the Soup’: Domestic Violence in Revolutionary Russia, 1900–1936,”
supported by IREX, see description at h p://www.irex.org/resource/more-you-beat-your-wife-
tastier-soup-domestic-violence-revolutionary-russia-1900-1936-resea (accessed 18 March 2013).
See also: Lynne A wood, The New Soviet Man and Woman (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990); Barbara E. Clements, B. E. Engel, and Ch. Worobec, eds., Russian’s Women: Accom-
modation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Linda Ed-
mondson, Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), and many others.
13. The 1918 Constitution never explicitly proclaimed gender equality but it gave women
all rights, including political rights, by referring to “citizens of both sexes” (art. 64). Konstitutsiia
RSFSR 1918 goda [1918 Constitution of the RSFSR], h p://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/cnst1918
.htm (accessed 26 June 2013). See English translation: The Russian Constitution. Adopted July 10
1918 (New York: The Nation Press, 1919), h p://debs.indstate.edu/r969r87_1919.pdf (accessed
26 June 2013).
14. See further Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women’s Roles in Rural De-
velopment in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Barbara Holland,
Soviet Sisterhood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the
State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993); Yulia Gradskova, “Soviet People with Female Bodies: Performing Beauty
and Maternity in Soviet Russia in the Mid 1930s–1960s” (PhD diss., Stockholm University,
2007).
15. See Lynne A wood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of
Female Identity (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), 4–15.
BYTOVUKHA 117
16. Ibid., 52–53.
17. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Sryvaite maski. Identichnost’ i samozvanstvo v Rossii XX veka [Tear o ff
your masks: Identity and imposture in twentieth-century Russia] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011), 163–
165; Fitzpatrick, “Lives and Times,” in In the Shadows of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women
from 1917 to the Second World War, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yurii Slezkine (Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press, 2000), 3–17.
18. See Horne, “Domestic Violence,” 57; Semenoff , “The Women’s Movement,” 51–58.
19. A wood, Creating the New Soviet Woman, 5.
20. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Mapping Private Spheres in the Soviet Context,” in Borders of
Socialism: Private Spheres in Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2006), 3–4.
21. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 300; Kharkhordin, “Reveal and Dis-
simulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia,” in Public and Private in Thought and
Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 303–363.
22. Harold J. Berman, “Soviet Family Law in the Light of Russian History and Marxist
Theory,” Yale Law Journal 56 (1946–1947): 35–36.
23. Aleksandra Kollontai, Sem’ia i kommunisticheskoe obshchestvo [The family and the com-
munist society] (Petrograd: Gosud. izd-vo, 1920); E. B. Pashukanis, Obshchaia teoriia prava i
marksizm [General theory of law and Marxism] (Moscow: Izd-vo Kommunisticheskoi akademii,
1928); G. Goikhbarg, Sravnitel’noe semeinoe pravo [Comparative family law] (Leningrad: Iurid.
izd-vo NKIu RSFSR, 1927).
24. The full titles are The Code of Laws Relating to Acts of Civil Status, Marriage, Fam-
ily and Guardianship (1918) and The Code of Laws on Marriage, Family and Guardianship
(1926). See English translation in: The Family in the USSR: The Documents and Readings, ed. Karl
Mannheim (London: Rudolph Schlesinger, 1949).
25. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 296–336.
26. “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 8 iulia 1944 goda ‘Ob uvelichenii gos-
udarstvennoi pomoshchi beremennym zhenshchinam, mnogodetnym i odinokim materiam,
usileniia okhrany materinstva i detstva, ob ustanovlenii pochetnogo zvaniia ‘Mat’ geroinia’ i
uchrezhdeniia ordena “Materinskaia slava’ i medali ‘Medal’ materinstva’” [The Edict of the
Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR from 8 July 1944 “On extending state support to
pregnant women, mothers of many children and single mothers, strengthening the protection
of motherhood and childhood, on introducing the honorary title ‘Mother Hero’, the decora-
tion ‘Mother’s Glory’ and the medal ‘Mother ’s medal’”], Vedomosti VS SSSR [The Bulletin of the
Supreme Court of the USSR] no. 37 (1944); “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 14
maia 1945 goda ‘O poriadke primeneniia ukaza Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 8 iu-
lia 1944 goda v otnoshenii detei, roditeli kotorykh ne sostoiat mezhdu soboi v zaregistrirovan-
nom brake” [The Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR from 14 May 1945
“On the application of the Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR from 8
July 1944 to children, whose parents are not in the registered marriage union”], Vedomosti VS
SSSR [The Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the USSR] no. 15 (1945).
27. “Kodeks o brake i sem’e” [The Code of Marriage and Family Law], Vedomosti VS RS-
FSR [The Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR] no. 32 (1969): 1397. See further Gail W.
Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1978), 82–84, 110–112, 242–244; Helene Carlbäck, “Tracing the Roots of
Early Soviet Family Laws,” in Gender Transitions in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. I. A. Morell,
H. Carlbäck, M. Hurd, and S. Rastback (Eslov: Forlags ab Gondolin, 2005), 69–84; Beatrice B.
118 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
Farnsworth, “Bolshevik Alternatives and the Soviet Family: The 1926 Marriage Law Debate,” in
Women in Russia, ed. D. Atkinson, A. Dallin, and G. W. Lapidus (Brighton: The Harvester Press,
1978), 139–166; and others.
28. Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii. Vol. XV. Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel’nykh
(1912) [The Compendium of Laws of the Russian Empire], h p://civil.consultant.ru/reprint/
books/229/159.html#img160 (accessed March 18 2013). See also: Barbara Engel, Breaking the Ties
That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2011), 104–109; Marianna Muravyeva, “Between Law and Morality: Violence Against
Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture,
ed. Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers, 2011), 209–238.
29. M. N. Gernet and A. N. Trainin, eds., Ugolovnyi kodeks. Nauchno-populiarnyi prakticheskii
kommentarii [Criminal code: Popular-scientifi c practical commentary] (Moscow: Pravo i zhizn’,
1925), 216–221; I. T. Goliakova, ed., Ugolovnoe pravo. Uchebnik dlia iuridicheskikh shkol [Crimi-
nal law. The textbook for schools of law] (Moscow: Iuridicheskoe izd-vo Ministerstva iustitsii
SSSR, 1947), 282–287; V. D. Menshagin and Z. A. Vyshinskaia, Sovetskoe ugolovnoe pravo [Soviet
criminal law] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd-vo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1950), 295–304; M. D.
Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia protiv zhizni i zdorov’ia [Crimes against life and health] (Moscow:
Iuridicheskoe izd-vo MIu SSSR, 1947), 36–58.
30. V. A. Vladimirov, ed., Sovetskoe ugolovnoe pravo. Osobennaia chast’. Prestupleniia protiv
lichnosti [Soviet Criminal Law. Special part. Crimes against a person] (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia
literatura, 1964), 11–21; N. I. Zagorodnikov, ed., Ugolovnoe pravo. Obshchaia i osobennaia chasti
[Criminal law. General and special parts] (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1969), 330–350;
G. L. Kriger, A. A. Piontkovskii, and P. S. Romashkin, Kurs sovetskogo ugolovnogo prava: Prestu-
pleniia protiv lichnosti, eie prav [The course of Soviet criminal law: Crimes against a person and
their rights], 6 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), V, 38–72.
31. B. S. Volkov, Motivy prestuplenii. Ugolovno-pravovoe i sotsial’no-psikhologicheskoe issledo-
vanie [Motives of crime. Criminal, legal, and socio-psychological research] (Kazan’: Izd-vo Ka-
zanskogo universiteta, 1982), 48.
32. Gernet and Trainin, eds., Ugolovnyi kodeks, 235–237; Goliakova, ed., Ugolovnoe pravo,
291–293; Menshagin and Vyshinskaia, Sovetskoe ugolovnoe pravo, 313–318; Shargorodskii, Prestu-
pleniia, 345–346.
33. Vladimirov, ed., Sovetskoe ugolovnoe pravo, 35–37; Zagorodnikov, ed., Ugolovnoe pravo,
342–347; Kriger, Piontkovskii, and Romashkin, Kurs, 111–123.
34. See Gordon B. Smith, Reforming the Russian Legal System (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 46–47.
35. A. A. Getsenzon, Ugolovnoe pravo i sotsiologiia. Problemy sotsiologii ugolovnogo prava i ugo-
lovnoi politiki [Criminal law and sociology. Issues in criminal law and penal policy] (Moscow:
Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1970), 71–73; V. V. Luneev, Prestupnost’ XX veka. Mirovye, regional’nye
i rossiiskie tendentsii [Criminality in the twentieth century. World, regional and Russian trends]
(Moscow: Wolters Kluwer, 2005), 412–420; S. S. Ovchinskii, Prestupnoe nasilie. Prestupnost’ v
gorodakh [Criminal violence. Criminality in cities] (Moscow: INFA-M, 2007), 65–71; cf. William
Alex Pridemore, “Weekend Eff ects on Binge Drinking and Homicide: The Social Connection
between Alcohol and Violence in Russia,” Addiction 99 (2004): 1034–1041.
36. I. A. Kurganov, Sem’ia v SSSR. 1917–1967 [The Family in the USSR. 1917–1967] (Frank-
furt-on-Main: Possev-Verlag, 1967), 186–187; Iu. A. Korolev, Brak i razvod: Sovremennye tendentsii
[Marriage and divorce: Contemporary trends] (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1978), 147–
149; V. A. Sysenko, Ustoichivost’ braka. Problemy, faktory, usloviia [Marriage sustainability. Prob-
lems, factors, conditions] (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1981), 146; D. M. Chechot, Molodezh i
BYTOVUKHA 119
brak (zametki iurista) [Youth and marriage (lawyer’s notes)] (Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningradskogo
universiteta, 1976), 165.
37. On the Chubarov Alley case see Eric Naiman, “The Case of Chubarov Alley: Collec-
tive Rape, Utopian Desire, and the Mentality of the NEP,” Russian History 17 (1990): 1–30; Eric
Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 251–283; Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic
and Courtroom, 1917–1939 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 83–84.
38. “Postanovlenie VTsIK ot 16.10.1924” [The resolution of All-Soviet Central Executive
Commi ee from 16 October 1924], Sobranie uzakonenii RSFSR [The collection of laws of the RS-
FSR] no. 79 (1924): 786.
39. See, for example, T. Segalov, “Psikhologiia khuliganstva” [The psychology of hooligans],
in Problemy prestupnosti [The problems of crime] 1 (1926): 83–90; see also several collections de-
voted to hooliganism, which include various articles on the prevention of hooliganism, alcohol-
ism and hooliganism, female hooliganism, and the psychology and motivation of hooliganism:
Khuliganstvo i khuligany [Hooliganism and hooligans] (Moscow: Izd-vo NKVD RSFSR, 1929);
Ia. Bugaiskii, Khuliganstvo kak sotsial’no-patologisheskoe iavlenie [Hooliganism as a socio-patho-
logical issue] (Moscow–Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1927); Khuliganstvo i ponozhovshchina
[Hooliganism and knife-crime] (Moscow: Izd-vo Moszdravotdela, 1928). See also discussion of
hooliganism in the 1930s in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary
Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 52–53.
40. “O bor’be s khuliganstvom na kvartirakh: Tsirkuliar N 158 ot 14 iulia 1935 goda NKKKh
i NKIu RSFSR” [On the fi ght against hooliganism in private apartments: Circular N 158 from 14
July 1935 goda], Biulleten’ fi nansovogo i khoziaistvennogo zakonodatel’stva [Bulletin of the fi nancial
and economic laws] no. 25 (1935): 21–22.
41. Brian LaPierre, “Private Ma ers or Public Crimes: The Emergence of Domestic Hooli-
ganism in the Soviet Union, 1939–1966,” in Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism, 192.
42. “O poriadke napravleniia v sudy i sudebnom rassmotrenii del o khuliganstve: Prikaz
NKIu SSSR, NKVD SSSR i Prokurora SSSR 6 sentiabria 1940 g. N 111/786/2001” [On referring
hooliganism cases to courts: The edict of the NKIu USSR, NKVD USSR and the Prosecutor of
the USSR no. 111.786/2001], Sovetskaia iustitsiia [Soviet justice] no. 17–18 (1940): 4.
43. Luneev, Prestupnost’ XX veka, 155–165.
44. Getsenzon, Ugolovnoe pravo, 92; Ovchinskii, Prestupnoe nasilie, 1–5.
45. Ovchinskii, Prestupnoe nasilie, 5–6.
46. “Ob usilenii otvetstvennosti za khuliganstvo: Ukaz Presidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta
SSSR ot 26 iulia 1966 g. N 5362-VI” [On extending the punishment for hooliganism: The edict
of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR from 26 July 1966 no. 5362-VI], Vedomosti
Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR [The Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the USSR] no. 21 (1985): 369.
These fi nes were very high compared to the average monthly salary, which was approximately
100 rubles in the 1960s and 160 rubles in the 1980s.
47. “O sudebnoi praktike po delam o khuliganstve: Postanovlenie Plenuma Verkhovnogo
suda ot 16 oktiabria 1972 g. N 9” [On the court practice in hooliganism cases: The resolution of
the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR from 16 October 1972 no. 9], Bulleten’ Verkhovnogo
suda SSSR [The Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the USSR] no. 6 (1972), h p://base.consultant.
ru/cons/cgi/online.cgi?req=doc;base=ESU;n=11419;dst=0;ts=0425F0E154BB5066542E614CEC31
DF9A;rnd=0.4292893521487713 (accessed March 18 2013). See also: I. Ia. Kozachenko, “Publich-
nost’ kak obiazatelnyi priznak khuliganstva” [Publicity as a compulsory element of hooligan-
ism], Problemy sovetskogo ugolovnogo prava i kriminologii [The issues in Soviet criminal law and
criminology] no. 28 (1973): 116–125.
120 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
48. Iu. A. Kasikov, “K voprosu otgranicheniia khuliganstva ot prestuplenii protiv lichnosti”
[On the issue of distinguishing between hooliganism and crimes against a person], Uchenye
zapiski Saratovskogo iuridicheskogo instituta [Proceedings of the Saratov legal institute] no. 15
(1967): 261–277; B. Volzhenkin, “Otgranichenie khuliganstva ot prestuplenii protiv lichnosti”
[Distinguishing hooliganism and crimes against a person], Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ [Social-
ist rule of law] no. 10 (1973): 59–61; A. Inatov, “Khuliganstvo i prestupleniia protiv lichnosti”
[Hooliganism and crimes against a person], Sovetskaia iustitsiia [Soviet justice] no. 6 (1973): 5–7;
I. Portnov, “Otgranichenie khuliganstva ot prestuplenii protiv lichnosti” [Distinguishing hoo-
liganism and crimes against a person], Sovetskaia iustitsiia [Soviet justice] no. 14 (1979): 6–7; Iu.
Liapunov, “Sootnoshenie khuliganstva i prestuplenii protiv lichnosti” [The relations between
hooliganism and crimes against a person], Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ [Socialist rule of law] no.
9 (1980): 44–47.
49. V. Tsvetkov, “Koordinatsiia deistvii pravookhranitel’nykh organov po bor’be s
p’ianstvom i khuliganstvom” [The coordination of law enforcement actions in fi ghting against
drinking and hooliganism], Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ [Socialist rule of law] no. 11 (1980):
19–20; V. Zudin and S. Miliukov, “Profi laktika khuliganstva” [The prevention of hooliganism],
Sovetskaia iustitsiia [Soviet justice] no. 15 (1980): 24–25.
50. See Brian LaPierre’s book on hooliganism in the Khrushchev era for detailed policy
discussion and notions of domestic hooliganism: Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Rus-
sia: Defi ning, Policing, and Producing Deviance under the Thaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2012).
51. V. N. Kudriavtsev, ed., Mekhanism prestupnogo povedeniia [The mechanism of criminal
behavior] (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 240; Iu. N. Krupka, “Kriminologicheskie problemy predu-
prezhdeniia nasil’stvennykh prestuplenii, sovershaemykh v spfere lichnostno-bytovykh ot-
noshenii” [The criminological issues of the prevention of crimes of violence, commi ed in the
sphere of family-domestic relations] (PhD diss., Institute of State and Law, Academy of Sciences
of Ukrainian SSR, 1985), 4.
52. G. A. Romanov, “O bor’be s bytovoi prestupnost’iu” [On the fi ght against domestic
crime], Pravovedenie [Legal studies] no. 4 (1973): 56; Ia. Sootak, “Tak nazyvaemoe kvartirnoe
khuliganstvo” [So-called hooliganism in the apartments], Sovetskoe pravo [Soviet law] no. 1
(1977): 22.
53. N. F. Kuznetsova, Prestuplenie i prestupnost’ [Crime and criminality] (Moscow: Izd-vo
Moskovskogo universiteta, 1969), 203; G. A. Panfi lov, “O soderzhanii poniatiia bytovogo prestu-
pleniia” [On the defi nition of the notion of domestic crime], Voprosy bor’by s prestupnost’iu [The
issues on the prevention of crime] no. 26 (1977): 65.
54. N. D. Shimin, Sem’ia, brak, byt [The family, marriage, everyday life] (Moscow: Politizdat,
1964), 34–35.
55. Krupka, “Kriminologicheskie problemy,” 18–19.
56. See his fi rst book on reinvented crimes of passion: D. A. Shestakov, Ubiistva na pochve
semeinykh konfl iktov [Murders as a result of family confl icts] (Leningrad: Izd-vo LGU, 1981);
Shestakov, Supruzheskoe ubiistvo kak obshchestvennaia problema [Spousal murder as a social prob-
lem] (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 1992); and Shestakov, Semeinaia kriminolo-
giia: sem’ia—konfl ikt—prestuplenie [Family criminology: Family–confl ict–crime] (St. Petersburg:
St. Petersburg State University, 1996).
57. See, for example, A. G. Kharchev and S. I. Golod, Professional’naia rabota zhenshchin i
sem’ia [Women’s professional work and the family] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971); N. G. Iurkevich,
Sovetskaia sem’ia: funktsii i usloviia stabil’nosti [The Soviet family: Functions and conditions for
stability] (Minsk: Izd-vo BGU, 1970); V. A. Sysenko, Ustoichivost’ braka. Problemy, faktory, us-
BYTOVUKHA 121
loviia [The stability of marriage. Problems, factors, conditions] (Moscow: Finansy i statistika,
1981).
58. A. G. Kharchev, ed., Semi’ia kak ob’ekt fi losofskogo i sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia [The fam-
ily as an object for philosophical and sociological research] (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 119–122;
E. V. Shorokhova and V. P. Levkovich, Prikladnye problemy sotsial’noi psykhologii [Practical prob-
lems of social psychology] (Moscow: Nauka, 1983); G. M. Min’kovskii, “Neblagopoluchnaia
sem’ia i protivopravnoe povedenie podrostkov” [Problem family and juvenile delinquency],
Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia [Sociological studies] no. 2 (1982): 105–113; K. I. Igoshev and G. M.
Min’kovskii, Sem’ia, deti, shkola [The family, children, school] (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia litera-
tura, 1989) and many others.
59. Tatiana Kopylova, “Signal trevogi” [The alert], Chelovek i zakon [Man and law] no. 2
(1971): 77–90.
60. See other materials representing types of “neblagopoluchie”: a mother of seven children
involving her eldest daughter in criminal activities (extortion of money): Chelovek i zakon no. 1
(1976): 92–98; drinking fathers: Chelovek i zakon no. 7 (1977): 65–75; no. 5 (1972): 52–69; depriva-
tion of parental rights (of mothers and for abuse, which created an image of abusive mothers,
pathologizing and demonizing women): Chelovek i zakon no. 1 (1986): 60–61.
61. On domestic violence before 1917 in Russia see Marianna Muravyeva, “Povsednevnye
praktiki nasiliia: supruzheskoe nasilie v russkikh sem'iakh XVIII veka” [Everyday practices
of violence: Spousal violence in Russian families of the eighteenth century], in Bytovoe nasilie
v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti (XI–XXI veka) [Everyday violence in the history of Russian ev-
eryday life (eleventh to twenty-fi rst centuries)], ed. N. L. Pushkareva and M. G. Muravyeva (St.
Petersburg: European University Press, 2012), 52–104; Muravyeva, “Between Law and Moral-
ity”; Engel, Breaking the Ties; Christine D. Worobec, Peasant Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1995).
62. Shestakov, Semeinaia kriminologiia, 184.
63. Peter H. Juviler, “Whom the State Has Joined: Conjugal Ties in Soviet Law,” in Soviet
Law a er Stalin. Part I: The Citizen and the State in Contemporary Soviet Law, ed. Donald D. Barry,
George Ginsburgs, and Peter B. Maggs (Leyden: A. W. Sij thoff , 1977), 131–136.
64. Sudebnaia praktika Verkhovnogo suda SSSR [The court practice of the Supreme Court of
the USSR] no. 4 (1949): 4. On the diffi culty of obtaining a divorce see: Fitzpatrick, Sryvaite maski,
290–296.
65. See LaPierre, “Private Ma ers,” 202–203; LaPierre, Hooligans, 96–131.
66. Getsenzon, Ugolovnoe pravo, 71.
67. On the nineteenth century, see Muravyeva, “Between Law and Morality”; Christine
Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 188–194; Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Litigious Daughter-in-
Law: Family Relations in Rural Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic
Review 45, no. 1 (1986): 49–64. On volost’ courts see: Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go To Court:
Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Cathy
A. Frierson, “Rural Justice in Public Opinion: The Volost’ Court Debate 1861–1912,” Slavonic and
East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 526–545; Cathy A. Frierson, “‘I Must Always Answer to the
Law…’: Rules and Responses in the Reformed Volost’ Court,” Slavonic and East European Review
75, no. 2 (1997): 308–334; Gareth Popkins, The Russian Peasant Volost Court and Customary Law
1861–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Gareth Popkins, “Code versus Custom?
Norms and Tactics in Peasant Volost Court Appeals, 1889–1917,” Russian Review 59, no. 3 (2000):
408–424. On the resemblance between ecclesiastical courts and party control commissions see
Kharkhordin, Collective and the Individual, 49–55.
122 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
68. Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 67–68, 114, 424.
69. See Samuil Kucherov, The Organs of Soviet Administration of Justice: Their History and Op-
eration (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 154–197.
70. Ger P. Van Der Berg, The Soviet System of Justice: Figures and Policy (Leiden: Brill, 1985),
36–41.
71. Fitzpatrick, Sryvaite maski, 275–290. See also: Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citi-
zens: Public Le er-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996): 82–83.
72. Fitzpatrick, Sryvaite maski, 296–298.
73. Gertsenzon, Ugolovnoe pravo, 71–73.
74. Shestakov, Semeinaia kriminologiia, 37–43 and table 28 on 192.
75. A. Shestakova, “Prestupleniia protiv lichnosti v derevne” [Crimes against a person in
the countryside], in Problemy prestupnosti [The problems of crime] 1 (1926): 201–202.
76. Compare to the studies of homicide in the 1990s: Krista Eckhardt and William Alex
Pridemore, “Diff erences in Female and Male Involvement in Lethal Violence,” Journal of Crimi-
nal Justice 37, no. 1 (2009): 55–64; Pridemore, “Weekend Eff ects”; Pridemore, “Demographic,
Temporal, and Spatial Pa erns of Homicide Rates in Russia,” European Sociological Review 19,
no. 1 (2003): 41–59; Andrew Stickley and Ilkka Henrik Mäkinen, “Homicide in the Russian
Empire and Soviet Union,” British Journal of Criminology 45, no. 5 (2005): 647–670; L. I. Shel-
ley, “Inter-Personal Violence in the USSR,” Violence, Aggression and Terrorism 1, no. 2 (1987):
41–67.
77. B. V. Sidorov, Aff ekt. Ego ugolovnopravovoe i kriminologicheskoe znachenie [Aff ect. Its crimi-
nal, legal and criminological signifi cance] (Kazan’: Izd-vo Kazanskogo universiteta, 1978),
116–120.
78. Sidorov, Aff ekt, 106–116. V. N. Kudriavtsev et al., Lichnost’ prestupnika [The criminal
personality] (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1971), 59–60; V. V. Kulickov and I. G. Urakov,
“On—po svoei vole, ona—po ego vine” [He—out of his own will, she—because of his fault],
Zdorov’e [Health] no. 4 (1970): 19.
79. Sidorov, Aff ekt, 107.
80. Ibid., 102
81. Menshagin and Vyshinskaia, Sovetskoe ugolovnoe pravo, 303.
82. Bulleten’ Verkhovnogo suda RSFSR 3 (1981): 6–7.
83. Getsenzon, Ugolovnoe pravo, 74–75.
84. M. D. Shargorodskii, while discussing the circumstances excusing the application of
criminal punishment for infl icting physical injuries stated, “Physical disciplinary punishments
are not allowed in the USSR.” (Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia, 361).
85. Igor Kon, “Telesnye nakazaniia devochek i mal’chikov v Rossii XIX–nachala XXI veka:
Povsednevnye praktiki i obshchestvennoe mnenie” [Corporal punishment of girls and boys in
Russia in the nineteenth–early twenty fi rst century: Everyday practices and public opinion], in
Pushkareva and Muravyeva, Bytovoe nasilie, 174–196; Igor Kon, Bit’ ili ne bit’? [To beat or not
to beat] (Moscow: Vremia, 2012). Flogging was o en portrayed humorously in a number of
didactical stories, see, for example, Evgenii Kolodiichuk, “Bila menia mat’” [My mother used
to beat me], Chelovek i zakon [Man and law] no. 1 (1976): 141. The author tells a story about his
childhood, in which his mother once asked him to bring some potatoes from the collective farm
fi eld (which was technically a the ). The next day the teacher asked children to write a compo-
sition on the topic “Children assisting parents” and the boy told this story, which resulted in “a
serious conversation with his mother.” When the mother got back from school she fl ogged his
son and he refl ects: “I still do not understand what was it for: my ge ing an A or not bringing
enough potatoes.”
BYTOVUKHA 123
86. On infanticide before 1917 see Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Confl ict, and Justice in
Rural Russia: 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 145–176; Eve Levin,
“Infanticide in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 34, no.2 (1986): 215–224;
Dmitry Mikhel and Irina Mikhel, “Infanticide glazami obrazovannogo rossiiskogo obshchestva
vtoroi poloviny XIX–nachala XX veka” [Infanticide and Russian educated society of the second
half of the nineteenth–early twentieth century], in Pushkareva and Muravyeva, Bytovoe nasilie,
105–163; David L. Ransel, “Illegitimacy and Infanticide in Early Modern Russia,” in Early Mod-
ern Europe: Issues and Interpretations, ed. James B. Collins and Karen L. Taylor (Oxford: Black-
well, 2006), 268–281.
87. Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia, 85.
88. Getsenzon, Ugolovnoe pravo, 66.
89. Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ [Socialist rule of law] no. 12 (1935): 19; A. Tadevosian, “Ob
ugolovnoi otvetstvennosti za prestupleniia protiv detei” [On criminal responsibility for crimes
against children], Sovetskoe gosudarstvo [Soviet state] no. 8–9 (1940): 151–160.
90. Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ no. 11 (1935): 34–35.
91. B. S. Man’kovskii, “Detoubiistvo” [Infanticide], in Ubiistva i ubiitsy [Murders and mur-
derers], ed. E. K. Krasnushkin, G. M. Segal, and Ts. M. Feinberg (Moscow: Izd-vo Moszdravot-
dela, 1928): 269.
92. Tadevosian, “Ob ugolovnoi otvetstvennosti,” 158. On infanticide in revolutionary Rus-
sia see also: Sharon N. Kowalsky, “Who’s Responsible for Female Crime? Gender, Deviance,
and the Development of Soviet Social Norms in Revolutionary Russia,” The Russian Review 62
(2003): 366–386.
93. Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ [Socialist rule of law] no. 12 (1935): 20.
94. Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia, 89–90.
95. V. A. Serebriakova, “Prestupnost’ sredi zhenshchin kak ob”ekt kriminologicheskogo
izuchenia” [Female crime as an object of criminological research], Voprosy bor’by s prestupnost’iu
[Issues of crime prevention] no. 22 (1975): 30–31; Polozhenie detei v SSSR 1990 g. Sostoianie. Prob-
lemy. Perspektivy [The status of children in the USSR, 1990. Its state, problems, perspectives]
(Moscow: Izd-vo “Dom”, 1990), 22.
96. M. A. Kachaeva, “Ostrye psykhogennye depressivnye sostoianiia u zhenshchin v period
soversheniia obshchestvenno opasnykh deistvii” [Acute psychogenic depressive states among
women when commi ing publicly dangerous actions] (PhD diss., VNII obshchei i sudebnoi
psykhiatrii im. Serbskogo, 1983); M. S. Dobrogaeva, “Psykhoticheskie sostoianiia poslerodo-
vogo perioda i ikh sudebno-psykhiatricheskoe znachenie” [Postnatal psychotic state and its fo-
rensic-psychiatric signifi cance] (PhD diss., VNII obshchei i sudebnoi psykhiatrii im. Serbskogo,
1972). On Soviet forensic psychiatry see: Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics, 104–133.
97. M. I. Trushina, “Kak udalos’ bystro raskryt’ detoubiistvo” [How an infanticide was
solved quickly], Sledstvennaia praktika [Investigation practice] no. 79 (1968): 73–77. See other
reports: Sledstvennaia praktika no. 80 (1968): 43–46; 86 (1970): 62–66.
98. “Prikaz Minsdrava SSSR ot 31.12.1987 N 1342,” [The order of the Ministry of Health of
the USSR from 31 December 1987, no. 1342], h p://base.consultant.ru/cons/cgi/online.cgi?req=
doc;base=MED;n=2556 (accessed 18 March 2013).
99. Shargorodskii, Prestupleniia, 28.
100. V. Kufaev, “Detskie ubiistva” [Child killings], Problemy prestupnosti [Problems of crime]
1 (1926): 132–134.
101. Getsenzon, Ugolovnoe pravo, 74.
102. Ovchinskii, Prestupnoe nasilie, 134–137. See also a classic example of Soviet a itude to
crime prevention: A. Sakharov, “Glavnoe–preduprezhdenie prestuplenii” [Prevention of crime
is the most important thing], Chelovek i zakon [Man and law] no. 2 (1976): 33–41.
124 MARIANNA MURAVYEVA
103. See, for example, A. I. Dolgova, ed., Kriminologiia: Uchebnik dlia vuzov [Criminology:
Textbook for universities] (Moscow: Norma, 2005), chapters 13 and 14.
104. See, for example, “Natsional’naia strategiia deistvii v interesakh detei na 2012–2017
gody” [The national strategy of actions in the interests of children for 2012–2017], h p://base.
garant.ru/70183566/ (accessed March 18 2013).
105. Johnson, Gender Violence.
106. The USSR was not unusual in this respect as other countries treated family violence as
a social problem in the 1950s and 1960s. See: Breines and Gordon, “The New Scholarship.”
107. On traditional values and its recent conceptualization see: Igor Ponkin, “Pravo de-
tei na zashchitu. O pravovoi obosnovannosti oganicheniia propagandy gomoseksualizma
sredi nesovershennoletnikh” [The right of children to protection. On the legal basis of pro-
hibiting propaganda of homosexuality to minors], Tserkovnyi vestnik [Church herald] no. 23
(2011), h p://e-vestnik.ru/analytics/deti_propaganda_gomoseksualizma_3987/ (accessed 18
March 2013); Natalia Narochnitskaia, “Traditsionnye tsennosti i prava cheloveka: kontseptsii
i real’nost’” [Traditional values and human rights: Concepts and reality], h p://narochnitskaia
.ru/news/traditsionnyie-tsennosti-i-prava-chelove.html (accessed 18 March 2013); V. A. Kartash-
kin, “Universalizatsiia prav cheloveka i traditsionnye tsennosti chelovetchestva” [Universaliza-
tion of human rights and traditional human values], Sovremennoe pravo [Contemporary law] no.
8 (2012): 3–9.
108. On the term see: A. Rotkirch and A. Temkina, “Soviet Gender Contracts and Their
Shi s in Contemporary Russia,” Idantutkimus 4 (1997): 6–24; E. Zdravomyslova and A. Tem-
kina, eds., Rossiiskii gendernyi poriadok: sotsiologicheskii podkhod [Russian gender order: Sociologi-
cal a itude] (St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2007); E. Zdravomyslova, A. Rotkirch,
and A. Temkina, eds., Novyi byt v sovremennoi Rossii: gendernye issledovaniia povsednevnosti [New
everyday life in contemporary Russia: Gender studies of everyday life] (St. Petersburg: Euro-
pean University Press, 2009).
109. On the diffi culties of defi ning public/private or collective/individual see: Svetlana
Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2009) and Kharkhodrin, Collective and the Individual.
