Remaking the one from six months ago. Now with the primary cited books in my hands that the old post cited. The first book being This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong, and Russian Justice by Mary Stevenson Callcott. The previous post is here for your perusal.

This post, however, shall be hand-typed excerpts from their respective books that are relevant to the topic.

This Soviet World

Chapter XIV

When the All-Union Song and Dance Olympiad was held in the summer of 1935 in Moscow, the first prize for dance groups was won by the troupe who would be classified in the capitalist world as convicts. They were sentenced criminals who were still living in the Labor Commune Number Two, to which they had been sent for reformation. Their performance of an Ukrainian folk-dance "The Snowstorm" took first place against fifty thousand entrants. To anyone unfamiliar with the Soviet technique for handling criminals, the dancing of the group was less amazing than their free association with other groups of artists in all the local and provincial dance festivals, which brought them at last to Moscow.

The remaking of criminals is only one specialized form of the process of remaking human beings which goes on consciously today in the Soviet Union. Unlike those who justify ancient abuses with the formula, "You can't change human nature," the Marxist knows that human nature is constantly changing. The serf of the Middle Ages was a different human being from the highly skilled industrial worker of today, not only in methods of work but in mental outlook, nervous reactions, and even physical motions. Today a remaking of people in greater of less degree takes place across the entire Soviet Union. Illiterate, slow-moving peasants become attuned to rapid work in a collective-labor process. Scientists, artists, engineers, doctors, once accustomed to depend upon capitalists for their living, adjust themselves to the new controls of a socialist state as an employer. Some welcome the change, others resent it, but in all men the habits derived from the past are at war with the demands imposed by the present, and this struggle changes both the human beings and their environment.

To some the process of change is only half conscious and therefore bewildering and painful. To the happiest it is a consciously welcomed process. For all men in all ages have desired to change, to become in some direction "better." Moral teachers have urged them to effect this by an emotional decision to be good, honest, industrious. But this is a struggle in the dark with forces which the human being does not understand. His emotional conversion lasts as long as he can focus will and attention. But if the old environment continues, the old habits reassert themselves. To a limited extent a human being may change himself under any social system, not by efforts of will but by calmly analyzing himself and his environment and placing himself under the impact of other forces which will change him. So much free will man has. But these individual efforts are limited by the social possibilities. Can a prostitute change her environment so that street-walking will become unnecessary? Only if an honest job is somewhere accessible. Can gangsters reform? Only if honestly is really the best policy; for him who would prosper under capitalism there is a time to be honest and a time to steal, and the criminal is the unlucky or stupid person who stole at the wrong time and in the unaccepted manner. Only a social system which insures to ordinary honest labor greater rewards can be obtained by even the luckiest dishonesty will produce instinctively honest men.

A remarkable tale of the change in social standards is written by a newspaper correspondent from the Ural gold fields. Formerly, according to the writer, everybody admired clever miners who were able to steal nuggets which legally belonged to the private owners of the fields. This attitude persisted long after the mines were owned by the government. But recently at a party given to celebrate a betrothal, the young man in the heat of the dancing pulled out his handkerchief and with it a gold nugget which fell to the floor. There was a sudden silence and the party broke up without comment, even the girl turning away from the man thus revealed. "Everybody knew him for an enemy," wrote the correspondent.

The sharpest test of the conscience remaking of human character is found in the Soviet policy for handling law-breakers. The Soviet criminologist holds neither of the theories on which the prevalent systems of prison regime in capitalist countries are based. He does not believe in the existence of “born criminals” whose will must be broken by brutal suppression nor does he rely on emotional appeals to the “better nature” of the criminal, for he knows that this better nature exists as yet only in rudimentary form. “We don’t assume that a man of anti-social habits will be at once reclaimed by gifts of chocolate, nice bathrooms, and soft words,” a leading Soviet penologist told me. “Men are made over by a new social environment and especially by their work done collectively.” Soviet law aims to make over social misfits while protecting society from their attacks. Punishment as vengeance has no place in such an aim: revenge merely incites revenge in return. To make prisoners sit in solitude and think of their sins produces a fixation on crime. To “break a man’s will” or lessen his human dignity in any way injures him as material for a creative socialist society.

Soviet justice therefore aims to give the criminal a new environment in which he will begin to act in a normal way as a responsible Soviet citizen. The less confinement the better; the less he feels himself in prison the better. Soviet Justice began to fight crime under the harsh conditions of civil war, replying with ruthless measures to counter-revolutionary plots. “We have a double approach,” said Attorney-General Vyshinsky in an interview. “Active, confirmed enemies of our Soviet power who stick at nothing to injure us must be ruthlessly crushed. But even among these alien elements, among nobles, landlords, tsarist officers, capitalists, whom we had robbed of their private property, we had to be able even there to find those individuals who could be made over into useful workers. We cannot begin with clean hands and fresh bricks to build socialism; But if we had tried to apply the idea of absolute humanitarianism to bitter enemies we wouldn’t be here today.” [Alaskaball note: remember private property specifically refers to Capital Goods, aka The Means of Production.]

Many social offenses are handled without bringing them into ordinary courts at all. A whole series of "comradely courts," in which factories and apartment houses, try informally people who disturb their neighbors. These courts have the right to fix small fines for the benefit of the local club or library; they refer cases which even they cannot handle to the public courts. There are even "children's courts" in which children judge each other in the presence of interested adults. One such children's court in an apartment house tried a boy for cruelty in killing a cat, and came finally to the conclusion that the real culprit was the superintendent of the apartment house who persistently failed to provide a place to play. The superintendent who was present, accepted the decision, and organized with the children a committee to make good the shortcoming.

"Not only in the court but out of the court my job is social protection," a rural judge told me. "I must prevent court cases when I can." He told me how he had prevented crime at a recent saints' festival. "Men always drink hard on such occasions, they fight and knife each other. So I called together the presidents of collective farms and the Party members, and we went through the crowd before drinking begand and took away the knifes and canes. They got drunk later, but nobody was badly hurt."

[The Anna-Louise Strong chapter is continued in the comments below]