The erosion of boundaries was a common motif in descriptions of Soviet life during the 1920s. It provided a powerful way of signifying the different rules in operation after the Bolshevik Revolution.Footnote 1 Soviet criminal science was a microcosm of this larger change in thought and practice. Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet, the jurist and criminologist, was particularly fond of using the imagery of prerevolutionary boundaries and their post-revolutionary destruction to describe developments in his field. Under the autocracy, he claimed, scientists were kept away from criminals and their site of containment—the prison. It was, Gernet noted with a degree of dark humor, rather easy to gain entry to a Tsarist prison cell as a political activist, but not as a researcher, who was met at the prison door with the sign: “Entrance to outsiders is strictly prohibited.” In sharp contrast, Soviet scientists were invited into the prisons and given direct access to the inmates. Gernet wrote: “The possibility for us to go right up to living criminals first appeared under Soviet power; until then, we only saw them in the courtroom and behind prison bars, and were not given the opportunity to get near them.”Footnote 2
Soviet criminologists’ entry into the prisons fulfilled a long-held desire that reflected assumptions about the connection between total knowledge and the redemptive power of the sciences. Modern criminology, as an “intellectual enterprise” concerned with understanding and eliminating the causes of crime, increasingly focused on managing the risk posed to society by some of its members.Footnote 3 This way of thinking shifted the gaze of researchers from aggregate populations to the body and mind of individual criminals, who were now seen as the bearers of important truths about human nature and society as a whole. Revealing these truths would require criminologists to get “face-to-face” (litso k litsu) with criminals and closely observe them “with their own eyes.”Footnote 4 The information gleaned from such encounters became the basis for penal policies that aimed to rehabilitate offenders through individualized sanctions. In this way the prison became a site of scientific investigation and human redemption as much as containment and separation.Footnote 5
Criminology’s agenda resonated powerfully within the context of a regime that sought to emancipate humankind via a thoroughgoing transformation of life, extending from the larger systemic revolution to the individualized cure. Everything and everyone were open to scrutiny in order to understand human beings and society in of all their interconnectedness. Only then, it was assumed, could a more rational, equal, and just world be created. At the same time, the massive upheavals caused by years of war and revolutionary strife created a stronger affinity between the state and the human and social sciences, which were enlisted in the effort to remake people and reintegrate society. The Bolsheviks may have precluded avenues of investigation that challenged their ideological premises and political control, including positivist sociology, but the utopian and pragmatic concerns of revolutionary governance also created unprecedented opportunities for gathering information and contemplating new ways of organizing individual and collective life.Footnote 6
This article contends that the boundlessness of Soviet socialism created an environment that was conducive to the totalizing potentials already contained in modern criminological discourse. The boundaries to be removed included the social ones that separated the person from professional power, but also the disciplinary boundaries that made for overspecialization. This total approach to society would be facilitated by the total science of redemption and cure. It fostered institutions and research programs that pulled together the various disciplines involved in the study of crime and its prevention, in the process seeking to overcome the boundaries between specializations and to elide the apparently false divisions between the individual and society, between practical and theoretical knowledge, and between researchers and their objects of study. The result was a collaborative ethos that encouraged cross-fertilization and prefigured many of today’s experiments with interdisciplinary knowledge. Indeed, the sense that life had become too complex to be mastered through a single disciplinary lens reflected an emerging trend in the 1920s toward viewing integrated knowledge as key to meeting the challenges of modern society.Footnote 7
The focus here is a series of criminological research centers (variously labeled as bureaus, institutes, or laboratories) that were created throughout the USSR in the early to mid-1920s. Epitomized by the State Institute for the Study of Crime and the Criminal, these centers represented an ambitious effort to pool the country’s scientific forces. Bringing together representatives of sociology, psychiatry, psychology, medicine, law, and anthropology, they were premised on the belief that total knowledge of crime and humanity was not only beneficial but also achievable. In the face of specialization and disciplinary fragmentation, which were thought to obscure larger truths, Soviet criminologists instead spoke of constructing a “comprehensive” or “all-sided” (vsestoronnii) approach that united different fields of knowledge and practice, and seemingly promised greater control over life and fate.
The criminological centers therefore offer a case study in the modern striving toward interdisciplinarity. Historians concur that these institutions reflected the experimental impulses of the period. They have cited them as examples of Soviet progressivism, lauded their multifaceted and novel research, and regarded them as expressions of an emergent profession.Footnote 8 However, they have yet to consider the centers as a problem in the history of interdisciplinary knowledge. Viewed through this lens, institutional structures, methodologies, and rhetoric reveal the dynamics that shaped criminology’s development as a multidisciplinary enterprise that fostered interaction if not integration.Footnote 9 This outcome partly reflected the tenacity of disciplinary identities and thinking, as well as the challenges posed by an unpredictable political atmosphere. Moreover, we must recognize the malleability of the interdisciplinary ideal itself, which remains contested and mostly unrealized to this day. Soviet desires for an “all-sided” approach to criminology were more about the urge for “a wide-ranging, total knowledge” and the synthetic unity of the sciences than they were about radically restructuring the disciplines.Footnote 10
Criminology and the Structures of Scientific Collaboration
Soviet criminology arose during the so-called “transition period” of the Bolshevik Revolution. Epitomized by the New Economic Policy (NEP), itself a kind of hybrid approach to rebuilding the country after years of devastation, the transition period represented an uncomfortable mixing of the old and new. In the realm of the economy, the regime allowed for the temporary restoration of capitalist elements, while a limited polyphony prevailed in science, education, and everyday life. The result was experimentation and anxiety, as utopian dreaming existed alongside a nagging sense that control over the revolution was slipping away.Footnote 11 Both tendencies were reflected in Soviet criminology. Its practitioners embraced new possibilities for transforming individuals and their surroundings, while simultaneously facilitating the search for order and security.
All this took place as postwar states in Europe and the Americas were turning to the human and social sciences to stabilize society and promote “community.”Footnote 12 Criminologists played a role in this process by both creating the narrative of social breakdown and offering themselves as a solution. For example, statistical pictures of rising criminality after the war became standard fare in the literature, a seeming confirmation of Emile Durkheim’s theories about social cohesion.Footnote 13 At the same time, prisons were being turned into sites of research and rehabilitation as a result of the growing influence of positivist criminology and the reform movement in penology.Footnote 14 Delegates to the Ninth International Penitentiary Congress in London (1925), which lacked Soviet representation but signified the universalizing aspirations of the field, endorsed the idea of establishing laboratories or clinics inside prisons as a means of both gathering information about the causes of crime and improving the effectiveness of sanctions applied to individual prisoners.Footnote 15 The delegates could point to examples already in existence, such as the psychiatric clinics established in U.S. prisons, the anthropological laboratories in Belgium, or the criminological research being conducted in Argentina and Bavaria.Footnote 16 These efforts represented the shift toward individualizing the study of criminals and symbolized the rise of the “medico-legal state,” which required an apparatus to combat “dangerousness” and other “social ills” in order to create a healthy, unitary society.Footnote 17
Soviet criminology developed within the context of a state that expressed a particular vision of the universal society and how it would be achieved. Under the Bolsheviks, the state was the instrument for binding society and, simultaneously, breaking it apart, with the goal of creating a harmony that freed people to maximize their potential.Footnote 18 It became the sphere within which everyone and everything existed, embodying a socialism that denied any boundaries between state and society, or between individuals and the collective.Footnote 19 For criminologists, like other Soviet scientists, the state was their sole patron. It provided them funds, institutional support, personnel, and direction.Footnote 20 More important, its expansiveness also meant unmediated access to the criminal personality and the entire milieu that played a role in its development. Soviet modernity, particularly in its earlier manifestations, encouraged researchers to think big and called for sweeping solutions to problems that had long bedeviled human civilization.
The regime’s visions of total transformation went against specialization by promoting the belief that complete mastery of human affairs required boundless knowledge. Large-scale multidisciplinary research institutes, which predated the revolution, became one of the central organizational models of Soviet science during the 1920s and beyond.Footnote 21 Moreover, hybrid approaches and disciplines also came into existence, reflecting the adaptation of old practices to the new realities of Marxist ideology as well as the desire to extend the reach and relevance of scientific expertise. Such was the case with social hygiene, a distinctly Soviet field that sought to elide the traditional borders between preventive and therapeutic medicine.Footnote 22 Prof. K. N. Shapshev of Perm' captured the era’s zeal for synthesis when he pushed for a system of medical education that emphasized the interconnectedness of outlooks and practices. Without intentional “coordination” (uviazka) among different branches of medicine, he contended, the brain of the student was like a “mosaic,” filled with “bits of knowledge” that lacked any connecting “bridge.”Footnote 23
Soviet criminology pursued the multidisciplinary model as a solution to the country’s current challenges and future aspirations. Beginning in 1922, criminologists began organizing research laboratories that reflected varying degrees of eclecticism. These ranged from the Saratov Bureau of Criminal Anthropology and Forensic-Psychiatric Expertise, which investigated crime as a “pathological phenomenon” and the criminal personality as a fundamentally medical problem, to the Criminological Bureau in Leningrad (1925), which sought to foster stronger ties between medical, psychiatric, and legal workers.Footnote 24 In 1923, the Moscow Bureau (kabinet) for the Study of the Criminal Personality and Crime was organized at the invitation of the Moscow soviet before being transferred to the city’s health department. Central to its efforts was a specially designed questionnaire that sought information about the sociological, psychological, and anthropological features of Moscow’s inmates.Footnote 25
These individual institutions were eclipsed by the formation of the State Institute for the Study of Crime and the Criminal in July 1925 (with operation beginning in October). The State Institute was an interagency organ that belonged to the RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), but included representatives from the People’s Commissariats of Enlightenment, Health Protection, and Justice on its governing board. In many respects, this new institute represented the apogee of criminological research during the 1920s.Footnote 26 The State Institute not only oversaw a wide range of studies under its immediate purview, but also coordinated the work of four affiliates in Moscow, Leningrad, Rostov-on-Don, and Saratov in the hope of getting regional pictures of crime in the country. Moreover, it provided Soviet criminology many of the accouterments associated with professional or academic disciplines, including a periodical and a museum. Finally, as a central governmental body, it offered guidance and assistance to criminological organizations throughout the USSR, including those in Ukraine, Belarus, Siberia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.Footnote 27
Soviet socialism intensified the diagnostic and therapeutic ambitions of modern criminology. Researchers insisted that only in the context of socialism could the potential of criminology be fully realized. Capitalism was said to skew criminological thought and practice toward findings that reinforced the bourgeois power structure. Mikhail Gernet, for example, recognized the Americans as pioneers in creating prison psychiatric clinics, but also accused them of rushing to judge offenders as mentally ill, a move that lessened capitalism’s responsibility for generating criminality.Footnote 28 By contrast, the revolutionary nature of Soviet socialism, which aimed to transform the environment and all those within it, encouraged criminologists to study individuals and their surroundings in all their complexity. While remaining committed to the primacy of socioeconomic factors in the formation of the criminal, Soviet researchers also made room for additional causal factors, including the biological, believing that human beings were dynamic entities that had to be understood in a holistic manner. The solution to crime and other social illnesses therefore had to be a total one.Footnote 29
The reality of criminology in the west, which had yet to coalesce into a coherent academic enterprise and would not do so until later in the twentieth century, complicated the search for comprehensive models and solutions in the USSR. The field was riven by competition among various disciplinary and national outlooks.Footnote 30 Moreover, as Richard Wetzell points out, individuals doing criminological research were trained in other fields—law, penology, sociology, psychology, medicine, and psychiatry—and were engaged in a variety of activities ranging from the scientific study of causation to the development of techniques for incarceration and penal policy.Footnote 31 This division of labor was expressed institutionally in the USSR. Besides the criminological laboratories, criminals were investigated at research centers like Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev’s Pyschoneurological Institute in Leningrad and the Serbskii Institute of forensic psychiatry in Moscow, and counted by the Department of Moral Statistics within the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU).Footnote 32 Meanwhile, criminology was taught as a sub-discipline in the faculties of law at institutions of higher learning, most notably Moscow State University, which also contained a museum of criminology and penal policy.Footnote 33
The State Institute was meant to overcome this fragmentation. Its organizers touted their openness to an “all-sided” approach built on multiple disciplinary perspectives. The precise meaning of this ideal was never spelled out, but the State Institute framed the goal of comprehensive knowledge as a collective enterprise. For example, its first work plan declared that the Institute was a “field [pole] for the collective labor of representatives from both varied specializations and within the same specialization.”Footnote 34 Similarly, a plenary session in January 1927 led to the adoption of a resolution characterizing the Institute as a space where investigators from different branches of knowledge and scientific schools carried out their work according to a general set of principles.Footnote 35 Here and elsewhere Soviet socialism was equated with collaboration. The indefatigable Gernet, who was active in both the Moscow Bureau and State Institute, argued that “collective labor,” which occurred sporadically before 1917, became commonplace after the Bolshevik Revolution.Footnote 36
Soviet criminology therefore was engaged in a broader debate about the nature of knowledge as much as the nature of human beings. It fit the pattern of collaborative projects that coalesced around complex problems. The task of understanding the causes of crime, which only became more difficult with the development of new theories and approaches, was deemed too multifaceted for any one field of inquiry to master. This was the philosophy behind Bekhterev’s Psychoneurological Institute, which upon its founding in 1907 promoted “team-work” (sovmestnaia rabota) as part of its “all-sided study of the psyche,” and the complicated nature of crime was cited as justification for “collective thinking” (kollektivnaia mysl') within the State Institute. Footnote 37 Outside the USSR, the complexities of modern life, compounded by the challenges of postwar society, also provided a push to view crime and other social problems as interconnected and requiring comprehensive responses. In the United States, the decade of the 1920s witnessed the emergence of the Chicago School of Sociology and the establishment of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Although only partly successful in realizing their interdisciplinary goals, these efforts questioned specialization and promoted the exchange of knowledge through collaborative endeavors.Footnote 38
Scientific cooperation was in this sense born of an instrumentalist purpose, seeming to promise more than a single discipline could do by itself.Footnote 39 The organizers of the State Institute certainly believed that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Periodic reviews of the Institute’s activities highlighted the diversity and amount of brainpower being applied to the study of crime, which granted legitimacy to the project. One such example proclaimed that the Institute had “gathered all the most distinguished representatives of Russia’s science of criminal law and other scientific disciplines engaged in the study of crime.” Reproducing Soviet rhetoric surrounding the marshaling of the country’s resources to build socialism, the author also included a list of participants to demonstrate the “great organizational work of the State Institute in mobilizing scientific forces.”Footnote 40 Thus, one of the primary purposes of the Institute was to provide a central place for the pooling of human resources. Indeed, compared to their counterparts abroad, Soviet criminologists stood out for their diversity of approaches and methods.Footnote 41
It was one thing to mobilize the scientific forces, but the organizers also had to set their priorities, coordinate tasks, and establish a division of labor. In other words, they needed to give structure to the eclecticism. Organizers of the State Institute emphasized the importance of planning, which they regarded as a hallmark of their efforts to promote comprehensiveness and which mirrored the regime’s wider approach to socioeconomic organization. To foster “the most systematic [planomernyi] work,” the Institute was divided into four semiautonomous sections that more or less paralleled the disciplinary fields that constituted criminology: a) the socioeconomic, which studied the dynamics of crime as a mass phenomenon; b) the penal, which developed and researched different types of sanctions and the treatment of inmates; c) the bio-psychological, which investigated the behavioral mechanisms and character of individual prisoners as well as the role of psychiatry in penal policy; and d) the forensic, which worked on improving methods of crime solving. Coordination of the different sections fell to a governing scientific council, whose five members reviewed and approved research plans based on proposals made by the Institute’s participants and affiliated governmental agencies.Footnote 42 Overall, the Institute integrated the various components of criminology, extending beyond the scientific interest in causation to encompass the abiding interest in detention, rehabilitation, and detection.
While seeking unity and cooperation among the participants, the State Institute favored certain outlooks, methods, and by extension disciplines over others. Most notably, the Institute’s leadership stressed that all the research being done by its members must be founded on the belief that socioeconomic factors played the principal role in the production of crime and criminals. Structurally, adherence to this viewpoint facilitated the dominance of statistics, including the survey form (anketa) as the basic research method, and was formalized in the Institute’s original statute, which proclaimed the primacy of the socioeconomic section.Footnote 43 Politically, it placed the Institute on firmer ground given the Bolsheviks’ ideological commitments. Participants often cast the preeminence of the social as an example of their devotion to scientific Marxism, a rather elastic proposition that papered over the fact that many of the participants were not Marxists, let alone Bolshevik party members.Footnote 44 In fact, the pressure to prioritize social explanations only strengthened in the years immediately following the State Institute’s creation in 1925. Responding to a proposal from Mikhail Gernet about the study of crime and the criminal, the attendees of the First All-Union Conference of Penitentiary Workers (October 1928) declared that the criminological laboratories had to be structured according to a certain epistemological order. Their resolution stated: “The Conference, while recognizing the wide-ranging activities of the institutions existing in the USSR for the study of crime and the criminal, believes that the all-sided character [vsestoronnost'] of such a study by representatives of different disciplines must be conditioned by an acknowledgement of the socioeconomic milieu as the primary factor in the development of crime as well as mental and physical illnesses.”Footnote 45
The State Institute’s interagency composition further complicated the striving for a common, planned approach. Scholars of the American experience argue that “extramural support” was critical to the success and failure of various attempts at disciplinary integration in the United States. Holding the purse strings, especially amid times of resource scarcity and pressing social problems, allowed organizations like the Social Science Research Council to redirect the flow of certain fields and push them to overcome specialization.Footnote 46 In the case of the State Institute, there was clear support from above for a centralizing body but less consensus about how this entity would respond to the needs of the different agencies that claimed an interest in the problem of crime. The Institute was formally under the umbrella of the NKVD’s Main Prison Administration (GUMZ), and concerns were expressed about the distorting effects of the latter’s dominance. In February 1925, the Commissariat of Enlightenment objected to the State Institute’s placement under GUMZ, fearing that this arrangement would give the Institute a “departmental [vedomstvennyi] character” and “narrow the established tasks.”Footnote 47 Moreover, while praising the Institute’s mission, each of the participating state agencies sought to shape the research agenda according to its own interests. This desire was evident at the Institute’s first plenum on December 18, 1926. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, head of the Commissariat of Health Protection (Narkomzdrav), argued that the Soviets’ belief in “social defense” necessitated investigations into corrective measures of a therapeutic nature. Meanwhile, reflecting his agency’s interest in rehabilitating criminals, Commissar of Enlightenment Anatolii Luncharsky pushed for the Institute to investigate juvenile criminals with an eye toward reforming them through education. Finally, Aleksandr Georgievich Beloborodov represented the NKVD’s concern with combatting crime and managing prisoners when he called for the scientific study and development of social defense measures.Footnote 48
The doctrine of social defense, which the Soviets trumpeted as the progressive basis for their criminal codes and penal policies in the 1920s, brought together the practical goals of penology and the more theoretical qualities of criminology.Footnote 49 Accordingly, the sanctions applied to convicted felons should not be about retribution nor based on the crime committed. Rather, they should promote society’s right to protect itself against individual or collective threats. The length, degree, and type of sanction therefore were to be determined according to the particularities of the criminal and judgments about his/her degree of “dangerousness.” This preventative strategy allowed for the continuous detention of highly antisocial and incorrigible persons while providing a range of custodial and non-custodial options when dealing with lawbreakers who were considered redeemable. Ultimately, the goal was to reform criminals and reintegrate them into society as productive members.Footnote 50
Organizers of the State Institute therefore sought to eliminate the boundaries between theory and practice.Footnote 51 Evsei Gustavovich Shirvindt, the Institute’s director and head of the Main Prison Administration, was adamant in his belief that the Institute had to avoid a “purely academic character” in order to be relevant to the “process of socialist construction.” This principle was reflected in the Institute’s membership, which encompassed individuals from the front lines of the “struggle against crime”—penitentiary workers, criminalists, and legal officials—in addition to researchers who were based at universities and clinics. According to Shirvindt, the blending of the theoretical and the practical was both natural and necessary, and he envisaged a mutually enriching interdependence between researchers and field workers.Footnote 52 As described by another summary of the State Institute’s ongoing work, its participants rejected the idea of knowledge for its own sake and strove instead to place “in the hands of the interested agencies new weapons in the fight against crime.”Footnote 53 In this way, the Institute rejected distinctions between the clinic and social arena with the goal of making tangible contributions to the new order.
From the beginning, however, there were tensions amid the lofty rhetoric of collaboration. During the deliberations over the content and character of the Institute, at least one person called its proposed structure purely artificial. Nikolai Nikolaevich Spasokukotskii, head of Narkomzdrav’s prison medical-sanitary department and a member of the Institute’s council, argued for organizing researchers according to themes or questions rather than specializations, a set-up that anticipated many of today’s efforts to foster interdisciplinarity. Moreover, he critiqued the elevation of the socioeconomic section above the other three. Even if the setup made sense for reasons of staffing, Spasokukotskii contended, it went against the “spirit” of the Institute and ignored the fact that all the sections were fundamentally “social.” By challenging the emerging structure, which coalesced around specialization and disciplinary boundaries, Spasokukotskii suggested a less deterministic path toward total knowledge.Footnote 54
Alternately, Marxism was presented as a potentially unifying force that allowed for different approaches, albeit through a single theoretical lens. Members from all four sections of the State Institute were welcome to propose themes for investigation and free to carry out their studies according to their preferred methodologies, just so long as they retained a sociological bent. However, the Institute’s director Shirvindt argued that the Marxist viewpoint should prevail and took pains to suggest that it was sufficiently flexible to encompass the work being done in each of the Institute’s sections, including those interested primarily in the body and mind. With some pride and a little defensiveness, he wrote: “The creation of the Institute’s bio-psychological section testifies to the fact that Marxist thought—while rejecting the existence of characteristic anthropological or anatomo-biological particularities that typify the criminal, and while perceiving an unbreakable connection between crime and the socioeconomic conditions of the given time and place—nevertheless devotes proper attention to those pathological changes that can develop in the person due to difficult conditions of labor, housing, nourishment, and so on, and while being the product of socioeconomic factors, can create a reduced resistance to criminality.”Footnote 55 In Shirvindt’s reading, Marxism would be the glue that held together the disparate scientific outlooks and practices, while also ensuring a progressive approach to crime and criminality that matched the needs of the revolutionary regime.
Challenges to the existing division of labor, moreover, did not mean a call to eliminate disciplinary boundaries; rather, the goal was to make them more porous and foster greater points of contact. In a set of theses on “the study of crime and the criminal” presented to the Leningrad Scientific Cabinet in late 1928, law professor Pavel Isaevich Liublinskii reframed the longstanding criminological debate over nurture versus nature as a negative product of specialization. Calling the dispute “speculative” and “fruitless,” he contended that it reflected the “one-sidedness” of the expert’s preparation. Trained in isolation and thus unfamiliar with all the methods required for the scientific study of crime, the typical researcher failed to grasp the full complexity of crime and criminal behavior. To end this narrowness Liublinskii called for an educational program based on “the sciences of the individual and society.” His proposal envisaged a prominent role for criminological laboratories and institutes, since they promoted the “collective work” of different specialists who were striving “to achieve the greatest contact in their work together and the greatest mutual understanding of the methods adopted by each one of them.” Instead of rejecting the disciplines, Liublinskii encouraged their enrichment through collaborative efforts that preserved both the “unity and variety of research.” In his opinion, open discussions, debate, and constant communication between the different criminological bureaus would promote cross-fertilization of knowledge and overcome the separateness of the diverse actors involved in the study of crime and the fight against it.Footnote 56
Overall, the founders of the State Institute sought to create a space that balanced the interests of multiple individuals, disciplines, and agencies with the need for structural and theoretical coherence. Mikhail Gernet summed up the situation when he talked about the Institute working in the “vast field” of scientific studies at the “frontiers” (granitsy) of researching crime and the criminal.Footnote 57 It was a spatial vision that blurred the lines between objects of investigation and suggested an expansive landscape waiting to be properly mapped and administered. Toward this end, the organization of the State Institute into four sections essentially divided the “vast field” into quadrants that reflected the domains of criminology and largely mirrored the disciplines. At the same time, the division of the Institute’s research agenda into so-called “collective” and “individual” studies created a looser structure that provided incentives for working together while also making room for personal creativity. Collective investigations were organized around agreed-upon themes, such as particular types of crimes and criminals, and involved each of the Institute’s four sections working on the same problem. Concurrently, members of the Institute were allowed to explore their specific research questions. Thus, the State Institute saw no contradiction between “all-sided” knowledge and personalized criminological research. Both could be pursued simultaneously within its borders and ultimately enriched each other, expressing in scientific practice the belief that the collective and the individual were inextricably bound together.Footnote 58
Ultimately, the Institute’s internal boundaries and hierarchies were the product of negotiation mediated by personal, ideological, pragmatic, and other contingent factors. While a fundamental restructuring of the disciplines was not achieved, let alone a primary aspiration, we should not overlook the truly ambitious and novel qualities of the Institute and criminological laboratories. Similar institutions outside the USSR brought together different actors in the fight against crime, specifically those who studied the origins of crime and those who dealt with its legal dimensions.Footnote 59 The Soviet examples, by comparison, are noteworthy for their grand aspirations, inclusiveness, and breadth. In particular, the efforts to overcome the historical divisions between the sociological and biological schools stand out from the work of their European counterparts, expressing a genuine belief that only by bringing together all the relevant actors could they truly comprehend and deal effectively with the challenges of crime. Theirs was both a practical and idealistic effort to meet pressing needs while also advancing the regime’s long-term transformational project. As the decade of the 1920s progressed and the relative pluralism of the NEP narrowed, the State Institute increasingly straddled a fine line by facilitating a diversity of approaches without betraying the regime’s commitment to a single, unified, and total understanding of human nature.Footnote 60
Soviet Scientists Encounter the Criminal and Each Other
The modern school of criminology promoted an intense interest in the personality.Footnote 61 Specifically, the social defense model made scientific expertise and the study of individual offenders central to the fight against crime, which could be neither contained nor eliminated through laws alone. Detailed knowledge of the individual was deemed essential during the trial process, for it would provide the courts with the information to adopt the correct sentencing and avoid miscarriages of justice, and during the post-trial period of incarceration or supervision, which would be tailored according to different categories of inmates. Indeed, the importance of getting to know the criminal as an individual was enshrined early on in Soviet law and the instructions given to penal workers.Footnote 62 As one account from Ukraine explained, individualized knowledge should inform decisions regarding all aspects of the prisoner’s treatment, including punishments, assignation of jobs, forms of reeducation, and eventual release. This meant understanding the prisoner’s “fundamental strivings and inclinations, his life, the conditions preceding the crime and precipitating it, and the basic elements of his psyche and physical constitution.”Footnote 63
The matrix of physiological, behavioral, and mental traits that constituted the personality became a space for representatives of different fields to work individually and together.Footnote 64 In fact, the Soviets’ insistence on an “all-sided” approach was at the most basic level a call for recognizing the complexity of crime and giving appropriate attention to its social as well as biological roots.Footnote 65 Individualized, multidisciplinary studies therefore became a central feature of Soviet criminological research during the 1920s. In December 1923, the Moscow Bureau for the Study of the Criminal Personality and Crime established one of the first criminological clinics in Russia, converting the Arbat house of arrest into a special center for both analyzing inmates and implementing progressive methods of incarceration.Footnote 66 Two years later the State Institute worked with the Main Prison Administration to set up its own clinic and test different forms of penal policy. The resulting Experimental Penitentiary Division had a permanent clinic (statsionar) and criminological laboratory, and housed roughly 200 prisoners, each of whom underwent examination by a sociologist, psychologist, and physician. These studies then became the basis for various forms of educational and cultural work with the prisoners.Footnote 67 In Ukraine, where an interest in penal policy took precedence, the direct interaction between researchers and their objects was facilitated through a network of cells organized inside prisons. Consisting of the prison director, the head of the cultural-enlightenment unit, the prison doctor, and a penitentiary worker, these “cells for the study of the criminal” were created in the interests of “promoting the proper application of corrective-labor treatment methods on prisoners” and for the “study of crime as a social phenomenon.”Footnote 68
Standing “face-to-face” with the criminal pushed researchers to collaborate and negotiate their relative spheres of influence. It was here, at the level of everyday practice that the boundaries between specializations were blurred and integration potentially occurred. In the realm of the courts, for example, calls for greater attention to the character of the defendant inevitably touched on the relationship between law and medicine, since they implied the need for psychiatric evaluations that went beyond the determination of the person’s capacity to stand trial.Footnote 69 To facilitate the process and to make the courts more amenable to the presence of the expert, the criminological clinics were identified as a space where law and medicine could come closer together for their mutual benefit. This was one of the motivations behind the creation of the Leningrad Criminological Clinic in 1925. Through small-group seminars that were led by seasoned “scientific forces” and allowed for hands-on learning, including the guided study of individual prisoners, legal workers would consider medical questions and become familiar with basic psychiatric theories and concepts. Rather than diminish their authority, this education ideally would lead to the “emancipation” (raskreposhchenie) of legal workers, who would be in a stronger position to evaluate expert opinions.Footnote 70
The methods for researching the criminal personality also created the potential for cross-fertilization among the disciplines. Most popular was the survey or questionnaire method, a low-cost way of gathering information that could be used to study both individuals and groups. It was particularly useful for carrying out mass studies of the prison population and overcoming shortages of trained personnel. For example, an early investigation of the Moscow prison system utilized students from the Faculty of Social Sciences (FON) at Moscow State University to complete approximately 2,400 survey forms.Footnote 71 Even in those institutions with sufficient staff and resources, such as the Moscow Bureau’s criminological clinic and the State Institute’s Experimental Penitentiary Division, the questionnaire served as the primary information-gathering tool, helping to structure the way in which experts interacted with the inmates and the relationship between different types of knowledge and expertise.
From the standpoint of scientific collaboration, the questionnaires functioned as “boundary objects” that facilitated communication without requiring theoretical consensus among various actors. Like specimens, museums, and maps, these standardized forms “were both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.”Footnote 72 In the case of the Soviet criminological investigations, the questionnaires were both universalizing and specific. They established a common framework for gathering information and thinking about crime but did not ask the disciplines to abandon their particular theoretical approach or impinge on their usage of the data. Indeed, materials collected via questionnaires became the basis for very different types of research, including sociological surveys that plotted trends and patterns through statistics; case-based narrative analyses that painted psychological portraits of criminal types; and investigations that sought to understand criminality as a constitutional disorder. In some instances, the questionnaire, in its capacity as boundary object, facilitated the study of problems along all three lines of inquiry simultaneously.Footnote 73
The strategies for completing the questionnaires reflected assumptions about the relative porousness or firmness of different disciplinary boundaries. Little formal expertise was required to gather sociological information, although a certain amount of tact, guile, and patience might be required in order to elicit complete and trustworthy information from the inmates. In instances when trained criminalist-sociologists were insufficient or unavailable, Soviet researchers relied on a network of prison officials, educators, and sometimes university students to fill out the sociological portions of the questionnaire. These individuals were guided by detailed instructions or specially formulated multiple-choice type questions, and had their work double-checked when possible for accuracy.Footnote 74 In contrast, when it came to collecting psychological or anthropological information, the criminological bureaus established firmer boundaries, believing that only medical personnel possessed the appropriate skills for carrying out the necessary tests and observations. For example, the instructions for the questionnaire used in the Ukrainian cells stated that certain facets of the personality study, namely those exploring the anatomical bases of psychopathology, were to be conducted by a physician.Footnote 75 Similarly, in his 1928 pamphlet introducing readers to the history and techniques of studying the personality of prisoners, Iurii Bekhterev noted that leading researchers cautioned against using prison educators for “scientific work,” since their lack of expertise could compromise the data. Thus, one of the primary goals of Bekheterev’s pamphlet was to set out a simplified system of investigation that would be low-cost and appropriate to the educational and skill levels of pedagogues who worked in houses of arrest outside the reach of the criminological laboratories. It was, in other words, an attempt to bring the fruits of scientific research closer to those engaged in the everyday efforts to reeducate and retrain lawbreakers.Footnote 76
The crossing of boundaries was therefore partly the consequence of pragmatic responses to the lack of funds and experts, which pushed individuals to take on expanded roles. A dearth of local scientific expertise in Saratov certainly animated the proposal put forth in 1924 by B. N. Khatuntsev. Identified as a member of the College of Defenders, Khatuntsev argued that ideally an individual’s degree of dangerousness would be determined by local criminal-anthropological institutes, and he held up the Saratov bureau as his model. The dearth of resources prevented the establishment of such a network for the foreseeable future, however, and so Khatuntsev called for creating a “surrogate” system that would be “better than nothing.” Specifically, he wanted to task prosecutors and defenders with the “social-psychological study” of the accused as part of their preliminary work for the courts. Khatuntsev recognized that it would be impossible for these actors to duplicate the extensive explorations that made up the typical “criminal-anthropological profile.” Nevertheless, he argued that during the course of their regular casework, legal officials were in a position to gather similar information, including data about the accused’s social life and upbringing, as well as her motives and attitudes. Redefining their realm of activity would bring to light data that otherwise would go unseen.Footnote 77
Soviet efforts to bring together the different fields of criminology suggest that some boundaries of specialization were more easily crossed than others. In particular, disciplinary knowledge and techniques flowed more readily from the social to the biomedical sciences. To be sure, the work of the Leningrad Criminological Clinic sought to bring basic medical and psychiatric principles into the realm of legal officials. But this did not entail the adoption of medical methodologies into their routines or an aspiration to claim a degree of psychiatric expertise when it came to making conclusions about the defendant’s personality. Instead, it had much to do with the desire of medical experts to expand their sphere of influence into the courtroom, and for this they required a legal system more open to their presence. Having legal workers cognizant of what the medical experts did and willing to recognize their authority in criminal matters would promote this desired direction in Soviet criminal law.
The crossing of borders, notably into the realm of mind and body, raised questions about jurisdiction and legitimacy. Khatuntsev, for example, wrote: “We deem the psychological study falling completely outside the sphere of the investigator’s capabilities.” Due to this limitation, legal workers in his scheme had to restrict themselves to the facts and refrain from making diagnoses.Footnote 78 Similarly, the legal scholar Aleksei Adol'fovich Gertsenzon argued that once sociologists took an interest in the criminal personality, they risked the “vulgarization” of knowledge by leaving their proper “sphere of influence.” This potential danger required them to restrict their research to the criminogenic forces in the individual’s everyday life and to the social “irritants” that helped to produce the personality over time. In calling for recognition of disciplinary boundaries, however, Gertsenzon also remained faithful to the collaborative ideal, arguing that the full bounty of criminological research could only be gained “through the close contact of all specialists.” In particular, he believed that sociologists felt most acutely their “dependence on the representatives of the bio-psychological specialties” when it came to drawing conclusions about the criminal’s prospects for rehabilitation and reintegration into society. While they could identify different elements that facilitated crime, they were not in a position to explain “why the given personality reacted one way, and not the other, to the aggregate of existing socioeconomic conditions.” This meant turning to psychiatrists and refraining from going it alone; otherwise, one became “an intruder in a field that at least for now is foreign to the sociologist.”Footnote 79
Physicians, psychiatrists, and neurophysiologists, by contrast, were encouraged to add the tools and perspectives of the social sciences to their repertoire. This push ranged from the State Institute’s insistence that all its members recognize the primacy of socioeconomic factors to the formation of hybrid disciplines. The latter suggested the possibility of cross-fertilization between fields and included sociobiology and social psychology. Even Gertsenzon, who argued against the “‘incursion’ [vtorzhenie] of individual specializations into a neighboring field,” made an exception when it came to sociologists’ engagement with social psychology and social psychopathology.Footnote 80 The idea of hybrid disciplines or outlooks also found expression in the way that researchers referred to themselves or others in hyphenated form. Sprinkled throughout the literature are references to criminalist-sociologists, physician-sociologists, and bio-sociologists.Footnote 81 Here too, there is evidence suggesting that the boundaries of the social sciences were deemed more porous. While it is not uncommon to see hyphenated descriptors like physician-sociologist and biologist-sociologist, which placed the primary profession first, I have yet to encounter reverse references to sociologist-physicians or criminalist-biologists. This order of things suggested the relative ease of grafting elements of the sociological approach, including its categories of analysis and statistical methods, onto other fields like medicine and psychiatry. It also reflected the ideological context, which made it politically smart to “speak sociologist.”Footnote 82 Indeed, in Soviet parlance of the 1920s the term “sociologist” was used rather loosely to indicate scientists who placed their subject within a social framework and sought to move from the clinic to the social arena.Footnote 83
Of course, collaboration between different fields did not require the actors to have absolute mastery and deep knowledge of other disciplines. In order to work productively together it was enough for Soviet criminologists to develop what scholars have called “interactional expertise,” or the ability to manage the language of other fields for communication and mutual understanding.Footnote 84 Such “linguistic socialization” was essentially the goal of the Leningrad Criminological Clinic, which gave legal workers the opportunity to learn the basics of forensic psychiatry and medicine in order to relate more effectively to scientific experts of the criminal body and mind. Likewise, the criminological practicum established in 1926 for students of the law faculty at Moscow State University promoted basic fluency in the scientific investigation of crime and criminals in preparation for their future work as penitentiary workers and criminalist-sociologists.Footnote 85 However, here too there are signs that the boundaries of the social sciences were more permeable than those of the biomedical sciences. In his 1926 review of the Moscow Bureau’s studies of the criminal personality, A. M. Rapoport cited physician-psychiatrists’ ability to assume the role of sociologist as justification for their leadership in this enterprise. Representing the personality as a window into the “roots of crime as a social illness,” he argued that its study should be directed by individuals “capable of unifying the data & that has been gathered by different specialists.” For him, this harmonizing force was the physician-psychiatrist. Rapoport concluded: “The study should be unified, and the psychiatrist alone can examine the personality both in the sense of its external conditions of development and in relation to its psycho-physical traits.”Footnote 86
In Rapoport’s vision we see a distillation of the desire for a comprehensive approach to the problem of crime and the criminal. As suggested above, the idea of an “all-sided” understanding entailed the application of different disciplinary methodologies, but at the most basic level it meant giving proper attention to the environmental as well as bio-psychological factors that led some members of society to act against prevailing laws and norms. One manifestation of this outlook was the State Institute, which served as an organizational hub for different actors and provided a theoretical umbrella over the various scientific forces that made up criminology. By comparison, the Moscow Criminological Bureau described by Rapoport offered a different path. Instead of the structural approach to collaboration, which allowed for some free play among the disciplines, it relied on a set of individuals to realize the benefits of multidisciplinarity. Specifically, the Moscow Bureau envisaged the medical profession as the centralizing force that mediated between the different fields and lent them theoretical unity. Prioritizing the biological sciences, this approach implied that the social sciences (specifically psychology and sociology) lacked rigor and strong disciplinary identities. Only those who could productively transcend boundaries, namely physician-psychiatrists, were in a position to realize the desire for total knowledge of crime and the criminal. Thus, the State Institute and Moscow Bureau represented different responses to the challenges of managing diversity. They suggested the still incomplete and unfinished nature of the Soviet experiment in criminology as well as the mix of incentives, compulsion, and negotiation that were involved in this complex endeavor.
Understanding the Collaborative Style in Soviet Context
Looking at the criminological laboratories through the lens of interdisciplinarity brings into relief a series of tensions that accompanied the redrawing of boundaries in the 1920s. Most notably, the laboratories grappled with the tensions inherent in modern knowledge. Their work highlights the challenges posed by fragmentation and specialization, which added complexity, posed problems of jurisdiction, and raised questions about the possibility of ever really knowing and controlling crime through a single discipline. In addition, the search for an all-encompassing science of crime laid bare tensions and contradictions regarding the status of criminals and their relationship to the rest of society. Believing that most offenders were redeemable, Soviet criminologists challenged the idea of collective separation by making the individual accessible to science and a source of answers, both particular and general, about the nature of crime. Footnote 87 In fact, the insistence on dealing directly with the research subject was a process of individuation that contradicted the tendency to view criminals as a “faceless mass.”Footnote 88 Finally, there were tensions between particularism and universal aspirations. Participants in the various projects to study crime during the 1920s extolled their uniqueness but were reluctant to abandon kinship with the international field of criminology, believing that the Soviet Union was where the full potential of modern criminal science would be achieved.
The criminological laboratories ultimately remind us that the boundaries of knowledge and practice are not natural and fixed but rather the products of history, politics, culture, individual relationships, and other contingencies. In particular, they allow us to consider the collaborative style within the framework of the growing move internationally to rethink specialization and explore multi- or interdisciplinary responses to the challenges of modernity. Soviet criminology, like labor, culture, and other sciences, was operating within a system that privileged collectivities and framed the building of socialism as a grand cooperative project. Working and thinking together were deemed superior means for solving problems.Footnote 89 In a time of scarcity like the 1920s, collaboration not only mobilized monetary, technological, and human resources, but also promised to maximize the return on researchers’ investment of time and energy. The pooling of resources according to a general plan meant access to more subjects, the production of more information, and in their minds the attainment of superior knowledge and results.Footnote 90 The State Institute was, in this sense, a form of “big science” applied to the social realm.Footnote 91
Patronage and personalities also determined the types of collaborations that were possible in the early Soviet Union.Footnote 92 The state’s role as sole patron after 1917 was a boon to criminal scientists, who gained unprecedented access to prisoners within a centralized regime that was dedicated to the scientific worldview. But it created the potential for instability by tying researchers and their projects to the careers and fates of government officials. The criminological research centers that sprang up in the 1920s were no exception in this regard, and given their interest in prisoners were perhaps even more beholden to the state.Footnote 93 In addition, the striving toward collaborative research reflected the commitment of individuals like Mikhail Gernet, who belonged to a network of professionals with shared histories as well as outlooks.Footnote 94 His simultaneous involvement in multiple projects hints at the fluidity of identities and professional boundaries as well as the power of personal relationships.Footnote 95
Such relationships became particularly important for survival and advancement in the post-1917 world. Years of unrest, economic collapse, and political change led to the closure of institutions, the emigration or expulsion of countless intellectuals, and the elimination of disciplines deemed threatening to the authorities. Some fields, like physical anthropology, remained in place, but had a particularly hard time adapting to the new regime’s ideological paradigm given their focus on human nature instead of nurture. As a result, practitioners often labored in formal positions that did not align with their exact specialization, including some who contributed to the criminological laboratories.Footnote 96 Hybrid disciplines and multidisciplinary forms of research therefore were born partly out of need and circumstance, since they allowed a wider swathe of researchers to exercise their expertise on behalf of the Soviet transformational project. In other words, scientific cooperation was one of the possible tactics for cooperating with the regime, with the degree of fluidity partly determined by one’s position in the new political and epistemological hierarchy. Collaboration opened up possibilities for new syntheses and the emergence of the bio-sociologist.Footnote 97
The Soviets, not unlike us today, struggled to articulate the content and form of their integrative efforts. Their preferred term—the adjectival form of “all-sidedness” (vsestoronnost')—was highly elastic and conveyed a multidisciplinary approach, since it suggested that a problem had to be surrounded and examined from all directions or vantage points in order to be fully understood. It connoted depth, comprehensiveness, and ultimately omnipotence, reflecting the modern belief—and the Soviet regime’s insistence—that complete knowledge and control over life was attainable. At the same time, the call for an all-sided approach to crime was recognition that life was getting too complicated for mastery by disciplines working in isolation. This required practitioners to open themselves up to other ways of thinking and doing, without necessarily giving up their disciplinary or professional identities. Indeed, notions of all-sidedness created spaces—cognitively and institutionally—for the interplay of the disciplines, with the absence of a deterministic outlook fostering creativity and allowing for organic developments. In this sense, Soviet criminology resembled what Julie Thompson Klein has called “composite interdisciplinarity,” meaning the application of “complementary skills to address complex problems or to achieve a shared goal.”Footnote 98
We should recognize the degree to which the unsettled and highly charged nature of the 1920s cut both ways in terms of restructuring professional boundaries and identities. Experimentalism certainly encouraged new institutions and a new constellation of scientific forces, but it entailed risks. Decisions to collaborate often involve a weighing of opportunity costs, since collaboration can mean giving up existing certainties for the promise of working in different and more complex environments.Footnote 99 Such decision-making took on special significance within the Soviet context, where the staking of new theoretical territory could be fraught with peril. This was particularly the case toward the end of the 1920s, when proponents of Marxist orthodoxy attacked criminology for its alleged adherence to “bourgeois” thinking.Footnote 100 Certain fields, namely those connected to the criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso, became politically toxic. In a highly caustic review of V. V. Brailovskii’s biosocial investigation of murderers, A. Gelovani sarcastically asked whether a book on medicine had found its way accidently into a legal journal and then savaged the study as an example of “‘Soviet’ Lombrosianism [lombrozianstvo].” Gelovani concluded with some ominous advice to Brailovskii: he should quit the field of Soviet criminology as soon as possible and restrict himself to “his narrow specialization.”Footnote 101 Amid a climate of unpredictability, sticking to one’s native discipline and exploring narrower, more practical topics therefore became a safer option, lest one risk the taint of collaborating with ideologically questionable outlooks and their adherents.Footnote 102
Soviet criminology’s fate was in the end strongly tied to the regime. After all, the attacks on Brailovskii and others engaged in the all-sided study of criminals were not born from a concern with the integrity of the disciplines. Their real aim was to expel them from areas that were being claimed by a set of political-cum-scientific actors who sought to make criminology a more narrowly utilitarian tool in the emerging Stalinist order. As part of this shift, the criminological centers were closed down or reorganized in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and given their short lifespan the full potential of their collaborative promise may not have been realized, particularly along the borders of medicine, law, and sociology.Footnote 103 This study suggests that integration was dependent on developments in education, institutional sites for cooperation, collaborative research methods and projects, and new languages or fields. The Soviet regime’s impatience to implement its vision of socialism worked against projects that required longer time horizons, not to mention a diversity of approaches.Footnote 104 When criminology was eventually revived in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, the interdisciplinary impulses of the 1920s did not return with it. Criminology now was housed firmly within the discipline of law, a safer ideological space that mirrored the field’s boundaries elsewhere.Footnote 105
