THE USE OF ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT BY LOCAL INSTITUTIONS OF JUSTICE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1920s (Based on the Periodical <i>Yezhenedelnik Sovetskoi Yustitsii</i>)
This article dwells on the use of scientific management tools by local bodies and institutions of justice in the second half of the 1920s, when these institutions experienced considerable difficulties with financing and enrolling qualified personnel. Elements of scientific management are considered here as one of the ways to overcome these difficulties. Moreover, it is emphasized that scientific management was implemented in the new Soviet state on a firm scientific and organizational basis. The author turns to Yezhenedelnik Sovetskoi Yustitsii - an official periodical of the People's Commissariat for Justice of the RSFSR - and archival materials in order to analyse the forms of documents that had been suggested by the Commissariat and used in records management by local institutions of justice as well as the proposals made by local personnel concerning their optimization. It should be noted that such proposals were submitted by ordinary employees, which shows their dedication and constructive approach to the work. Further, the paper looks at the new - registration-free - system of records management based on the practices that were applied in Western European countries and were at that time a highly relevant trend of the emerging science: management theory. In addition, the article analyses the pros and cons of the registration-free system. The author reveals the essence of the discussion that took place in the periodical concerning the record management reform. It was initiated by the employees of the Organizational and Planning Bureau of the People's Commissariat for Justice, who worked with document management and developed documentation forms. The author comes to the conclusion that employees of local judicial and investigating bodies as well as public prosecutor's offices took a nonformalistic approach to the tools of scientific management, seeing in them a possibility for saving material resources and rationalizing production processes, which improved these institutions' performance in general.