The transformation of academic criminal jurisprudence into criminology in late Imperial Russia

This dissertation charts the development of criminology in late Imperial Russia. It argues that criminology provided liberal professionals with a means to explore their own theoretical and practical visions of social order. Widespread anxiety over crime forced, jurists to reexamine the nature of Russian society and the role of criminal law in it. Criminologists sought to reconcile Western ideas with the liberal commitment to the rule of law and Russia's unique social and cultural conditions. The vast scope of their activity blurred the widely-perceived divide between the Russian state and society. Criminologists argued that penal alternatives, such as parole and probation, had the best chance of curbing the high rate of recidivism associated with the Siberian exile system.;Russian criminology was greatly influenced by biological theories of criminality popular in the late nineteenth century. Russian psychiatrists, or criminal anthropologists, identified themselves with degeneration theory instead of Lombrosiamism, or positivist criminology. The mutability of the degeneration metaphor made it an excellent pretext for representing social ills, such as alcoholism and vagrancy, as public health problems. The association of crime with social hygiene justified the growing role of liberal professionals in state and philanthropic responses to Russia's rapid industrialization and urbanization.;The Russian reception of criminology would be profoundly impacted by political culture. Criminologists linked penal reform with Russia's modernization and Westernization. The abolition of the Siberian exile system became a major goal of both the Ministry of Justice and criminologists. Efforts to reform the criminal justice system drew heavily on criminologists' expertise, but would be confounded by the state's limited resources and the weakness of provincial criminal justice institutions. The Russian Group of the International Union of Penal Law explored ways in which to surmount these obstacles, but the Revolution of 1905 undermined its partnership with the Ministry of Justice. Criminologists feared that "social defense" measures such as the prophylactic incarceration of criminals could easily be turned against political dissent. The politicization of crime transformed criminological debates into polemics on the law, individual liberty, and social justice.