The concept of punishment in the 1930 Small Soviet Encyclopedia and in criminal law today
The Small Soviet Encyclopaedia of 1930, in its article "Punishment", offers, besides the definition, a rather colourful gloss:.
"bourgeois 'justice' still makes use of the doctrine that punishment, being retribution for guilt, 'atones' for it, although the class task of the capitalist criminal court lies not in this at all, but in applying punishment to secure the domination of the exploiters."
And further:
"Soviet criminal law is alien to the concept of punishment. It regards measures of criminal repression solely as measures of social defence."
It is curious, moreover, that the same author, in the article "Measures of Social Defence", reports that these are
"coercive measures applied by the court to criminals as socially dangerous persons in accordance with their social danger, and not as punishment; if punishment is characterised by equivalence (equal value), by proportionality to the crime and to the guilt, then measures of social defence in their pure form represent a kind of criminal coercion that stands independent of the question of equivalence and depends exclusively on the social danger of the criminal."
On the whole, if one reads these articles attentively, it emerges quite easily that in 2021 we are still living within the terminological framework implied by the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia of 1930, which so conveniently leads a concept fundamental to the entire criminal procedure system away from legal specifics and towards a very broad political vagueness.
