The Prosecutors Custody Supervision Restoration in the 20s of the XX century
Custody monitoring during the first years of the Soviet Rule was characterized by such features as partial restoration of the formal prerevolutionary trial and social forms of imprisonment control, a total lack of legal experience, a wide application of local rule-making and a consecutive realization of class approach. Particularly, the custody monitoring process in that period was an additional duty of new revolutionary agents, which was given them by the Soviets organs (Revolutionary Committees) of different levels. There was no clear idea about the goals, sphere of activity, forms and system of agents that could provide imprisonment monitoring. It happened due to the difficult situation caused by the Civil War and the Intervention. The end of the Civil War and the New Economy Policy contributed to the criminal law and criminal procedure legislation development in the 1920s. At this time the restoration of the former prerevolutionary control and justice units including the prison monitoring ones took place. But in spite of the formal similarity with the previous units the newly arranged Soviet prison monitoring had a particularly new content. The Prosecutors' Control conversions changed the Prosecutors' Office into the main agent of the central public monitoring of the whole public activity. Thereupon, the previous prison control forms were substituted by Prosecutors' Supervision which represented a more perfect form of monitoring activity. Even at the stage of formation the sufficient features of the new Prosecutors' Custody Supervision included an external independent character, a high level of centralization, an efficient appointed sphere of activity, a large arsenal of remedy instruments using which gave legal effects. A low prestige and undeveloped professional skills of the first Soviet justice organs, permanent interference into their activity of the Soviet and Communist Party structures made the Russian legal community support the ideas of the previous Prosecutor's Supervision restoration and formation of a legal base for its activity. As a result, in January 1922 the Fourth Congress of the Soviet Justice Activists made a decision to restore the Prosecutors' Office and to adopt new criminal legislation as well as new criminal procedure legislation. At the same time many questions of Prosecutors' Custody Supervision organization and execution still remained unsolved. At that stage of historical development this kind of legal activity did not yet have its own embodiment. The sphere of Prosecutors' activity did not have a concrete subject and frames. The Prosecutors' Supervising was not detached from trial custody control and monitoring opportunities of NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs).