In recent years, a flourishing interest in both the history of international law and Soviet legal history has led to the publication of empirically rich studies that examine the extent to which the Soviet Union participated in the development of international law. Stalin's Soviet Justice forms part of this new wave of research. While some of the book's chapters focus on domestic law and politics in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, most of them discuss the Soviet Union's participation in the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, and more generally, its contribution to the history of international criminal law and war crimes prosecution.

The book is divided into eight chapters. The first chapter by David M. Crowe discusses similarities and differences between high profile trials of political adversaries (real and alleged) in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. In the second chapter, Alexander V. Prusin provides a nuanced assessment of the prosecution of Soviet citizens accused of collaboration with the Germans during the Second World War. He demonstrates the many continuities between these wartime treason (or collaboration) trials and prewar Soviet trials, in particular their high degree of ideological prejudice. Yet Prusin also shows that even though the Holocaust almost completely disappeared from Soviet official discourse, in the postwar years, military tribunals continued to prosecute Soviet citizens who had been involved in the murder of Jews—perhaps because the Holocaust often constituted the sole provable charge in the courtroom. The third chapter by Thomas Earl Porter investigates the politicization of Soviet war dead, in particular the extent to which Jewish victims were written out of the records of the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) as these passed from local to central level. The following four chapters focus on different aspects pertaining to the International Military Tribunal. In the fourth chapter, Valentyna Polunina examines the extent to which Aron Trainin, a Soviet law professor who was central to the development of a Soviet doctrine of international law, shaped the legal categories that were applied at the IMT. Asking whether Trainin represented “the human face of Soviet justice,” Polunina shows him to be a rather ambiguous person: a brilliant lawyer who engaged closely with western scholarship on international law and who made significant legal contributions to the IMT, yet also a man of the academic establishment who cooperated intellectually with Andrei Vyshinskii, the Soviet Union's chief legal idealogue under Stalin. The fifth chapter by Irina Schulmeister-André and David M. Crowe examines moments of conflict and cooperation in particular between the Soviet and the Anglo-American representatives at the London Conference in August 1945. The resulting London agreement and the charter in its annex created the legal foundation for the IMT, thereby effectively revolutionizing international law. As Schulmeister-André also traced in detail in her book Internationale Strafgerichtsbarkeit unter sowjetischem Einfluss. Der Beitrag der UdSSR zum Nürnberger Hauptkriegsverbrecherprozess (2016), the influence of the Soviet delegation (and most importantly Aron Trainin) could be seen in almost every aspect of the agreement and the charter. In the sixth chapter, Francine Hirsch (whose ground-breaking book Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II has been published in the meantime) tells the story of Nuremberg as one that recovers the Soviet contribution to the IMT while also highlighting the extent to which the proceedings themselves were shaped by the emerging Cold War. Through a close reading of the ways in which the Katyn massacre was presented and contested at the trial, she demonstrates how the Soviet side increasingly lost control of the narrative that they hoped to create at the IMT.

Chapter 7 by Jeremy Hicks examines the writings of several Soviet journalists who were present at Nuremberg. Throughout the months of the trial, the government centralized and standardized their journalists’ reporting by placing emphasis on the importance of the Soviet, and in particular the Russian, role in the victory over Nazi Germany. Still, some reporters were able to retain distinct voices, and combined coverage of the trial with their personal experiences as witnesses of Nazi atrocities. The book concludes with a chapter by Douglas Irvin-Erickson, who compares the interactions between two lawyers whose ethical and humanitarian concerns could not have been more at odds: Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and who led the international effort to outlaw genocide after the Second World War, and Andrei Vyshinskii, Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1939. In doing so, Irvin-Erickson reveals not only the many differences between the two men, but also some surprising similarities, namely their shared belief in law as a political tool—yet one that was to serve very different purposes.

At their core, many of the chapters in this book engage with the same question, namely how to make sense of the fact that a dictatorship like the Soviet Union, whose domestic legal system remained deeply illiberal, made productive contributions to the idea that individuals have to be held accountable for wartime atrocities—and as such played an important role in the development of international criminal law. In tracing just exactly what these contributions consisted of, and by revealing the contradictions and ambivalences inherent to this process, the book makes a valuable contribution to ongoing academic debates, while also providing a useful summary of the state of scholarship. Yet the book also has shortcomings. The chapters vary in terms of their quality and novelty, with some drawing on in-depth archival research or novel primary sources, and others providing more of a synthesis of the secondary literature, supplemented with a few primary sources. The introduction summarizes the individual contributions, but it does not really put them into conversation with each other, nor does it engage more broadly with Soviet legal history beyond select, if important, studies. In that sense, a larger, overarching argument about the nature of Soviet justice under Stalin does not emerge from the book.