Friday, January 3, 2020: 2:10 PM
Murray Hill East (New York Hilton)
Rebekah Ramsay, University of Central Asia
This paper examines early Soviet legislation against “customary crimes” – practices, like polygamy and bride-price, considered to be specific to non-European “minority nationalities” and thus to require regionally-specific criminalization – with a focus on Kazakhstan, the USSR’s largest “minority” republic. By 1920, the newly formed Kazakh Commissariat of Justice had underwritten several decrees forbidding a number of “customary” practices. In 1924, these early decrees were codified into formal Soviet law, with the addition to the RSFSR Criminal Code of a special chapter on “Customary Crimes.” After further investigation in 1927, the Criminal Code was updated in 1928 with the addition of a revised chapter on “Crimes Constituting Survivals of the Kinship System.” With the increasingly centralized and formalized criminalization of these “customs” came increasingly knotty questions about the theoretical equality of all Soviet citizens before the law (in contrast to the multiple, regionally specific legal structures of the imperial period).
This paper focuses on multiple layers of these debates – first, discussions in central legal journals; second, discussions held in Kazakh nomadic villages; and finally, discussions at the Central Executive Committee in Moscow where the legislation was finalized in 1928. These discussions reveal how actors at multiple levels approached crime, custom, and citizenship in the formative years of Soviet state-building. They suggest that theorists and legislators saw law as a pedagogical tool to shape new citizens, rather than as a series of punitive measures, while rural Kazakh communities approached the new laws more as a system to navigate than as an ideology to adhere to. They also point to tensions inherent in early Soviet nationalities policy – and in projects of postcolonial, multiethnic citizenship more generally – as, ultimately, attempts to eradicate undesirable practices and bring “backwards” groups up to speed inscribed difference even as they sought to erase it.
