Stalin's three highest justice officials recommended that petty thieves be sentenced to one year in jail for first-time offenses—a seemingly reasonable position. Their draft decree entitled "About mistakes in the implementation of the Decree of June 4, 1947” was submitted to the administrative department of the Central Committee in the hope (expectation) that Stalin would sign off.
There is no further record of this decree in the Central Committee archives. It disappears from view, which was Stalin's way of rejecting proposals he did not like. Sentencing statistics confirm that Stalin held firm to the long jail sentences. Stalin was not prepared to show mercy to petty o! enders, no matter how overwhelming the advice.
Why was Stalin not willing to bend? It may be that Stalin understood the consequences of unchallenged petty theft at the place of work or in agricultural fields. With property belonging to the state or to the collective farm, the products produced there belonged "to everyone and hence to no one.” If a few people stole a few kilograms of grain from the fields or radios from the factory, there would be no great harm. But if everyone stole, even small amounts, the harm to the state could be considerable. Moreover, with everyone either stealing or thinking about stealing, the only way to frighten off the millions of potential thieves would be by exacting excessive punishments even for small crimes.
Stalin's successors wasted little time in softening the June 1947 law. In a 1955 proposal to the Supreme Court, the director of the department for examining pardons proposed to set a maximum sentence for theft at ten years, citing cases where persons were sentenced to more than ten years for relatively minor thefts:
Sentencing to long periods of confinement (15-25 years) complicates the fulfillment of the most basic task of criminal justice—the reeducation of criminals. In many cases, the criminal loses sight of the perspective of being freed and falls under the influence of organized criminal gangs and, instead of correcting himself, carries out new crimes. Long prison terms, as a rule, destroy the family because according to existing laws a sentence of more than three years is a formal grounds for divorce.4
The post-Stalin leadership, therefore, considered law enforcement as a correctional system designed to rehabilitate the criminal, versus Stalin's view of it as a system to protect the state. In effect, Stalin's successors entered a new social compact with their citizenry. The new leadership overlooked minor infractions like petty theft and poor work performance that, under Stalin, were punished by prison. This new social compact was pithily captured by the motto: "We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us”; that is, we'll ignore the faults and mistakes of the leaders if they ignore our own.
World History
