Capital punishment Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...

was a legal penalty in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

for most of the country's existence. "Disrupting the planned economy" was a capital offense. Known as economic crimes, in 1964 ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

noted that "60 per cent of the 160 persons executed for economic crimes since 1961 were Jews." The claimed legal basis for capital punishment was Article 22 of the Fundamental Principles of Criminal Legislation, which stated that the death penalty was permitted "as an exceptional measure of punishment, until its complete abolition". According to Western estimates, in the early 1980s Soviet courts passed around 2,000 death sentences every year, of which two-thirds were commuted to prison terms. The death penalty was not applied to minors or pregnant women.

History

During the

Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was held on November 7–9, 1917, in Smolny, Petrograd. It was convened under the pressure of the Bolsheviks on the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Fir ...

in November 1917, the government of Soviet Russia decreed the abolition of death penalty. Later in February 1918, death penalty was reinstated and especially during the Red Terror. The first person to be sentenced to death by a Soviet court was

Alexey Schastny Alexey Mikhailovich Schastny () (1881–1918) was a Russian and Soviet naval commander. He commanded the Baltic Fleet during the Ice Cruise. He was executed on the order of Trotsky in June 1918. Life Schastny was born into a military family in ...

, Admiral of the Baltic Fleet, on 21 June 1918. Conditional death sentences also occurred in the early 1920s. Decrees issued in 1922, 1923 and 1933 provided police with the right to carry out

summary executions may refer to: * Abstract (summary), shortening a passage or a write-up without changing its meaning but by using different words and sentences * Epitome, a summary or miniature form * Abridgement, the act of reducing a written work into a sho ...

, but they were repealed in 1959. Capital punishment was abolished on 26 May 1947, but was reinstated in 1950. Capital punishment was extended to cases of

aggravated murder Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. ("The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the ...

in 1954.

Capital crimes

In addition to crimes such as treason, espionage, terrorism and murder, capital punishment was imposed for economic crimes, such as "the pilfering of state or public property in especially large amounts". The hijacking of a plane became a capital crime in 1973.

Economic crimes

Capital punishment for crimes against state and public property was reintroduced in 1961. During the same year, two foreign currency traders, Rokotov and Faibishenko, were retroactively sentenced to death and executed. By 1987, over 6,000 people had been executed for committing an economic crime. The death penalty was generally applied if the crime involved sums exceeding about 10,000 rubles, though there was no fixed threshold. Several officials were executed for economic crimes as part of

Yuri Andropov Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (– 9 February 1984) was the sixth paramount leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After Leonid Brezhnev's 18-year rule, Andropov served in the p ...

's anti-corruption campaign. Vladimir I. Rytov, a deputy Minister of Fisheries, was executed in 1982 for smuggling millions of dollars worth of caviar to the West. The director of Gastronom 1, one of Moscow's most prominent gourmet food stores, was executed in 1984 for corruption. The chairman of Technopromexport was executed in 1984 for "systematically taking big bribes". Bella Borodkina, head of the restaurants and canteens department in

Gelendzhik Gelendzhik (russian: Геленджи́к) is a resort town in Krasnodar Krai, Russia, located on the Gelendzhik Bay of the Black Sea, between Novorossiysk ( to the northwest) and Tuapse ( to the southeast). Greater Gelendzhik sprawls for alon ...

, was sentenced to death for receiving $758,500 in bribes. , url=https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/13/archives/graft-and-embezzlement-most-persistent-crimes-in-soviet-continue-to.html , title=Graft and Embezzlement,‐Most Persistent Crimes in Soviet, Continue to Plague the Economy , date=April 13, 1976 , access-date=November 13, 2022 ," what to an outsider might seem humorous was a life and death matter.

History

Capital crimes

Economic crimes

Contemporary status

Republics

See also

References