CRIMINAL LEGISLATION OF THE SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS IN THE 1920s: A COMPARATIVE LEGAL ANALYSIS
Relevance. Political events currently taking place on the territory of the former Soviet socialist republics determine systematic amendments to the current criminal legislation. The growing political instability, the growth of crime also contribute to the tightening of norms in the field of criminal law. These tendencies actualize the appeal to the historical experience of the development of Soviet criminal legislation.Target. The purpose of the article is to study the process of formation and development of the criminal legislation of the Soviet socialist republics.Methods. In the process of working on the study, the authors used comparative legal analysis, the historical method, the formal legal method, and the method of interpreting legal norms.Results. As a result of a comparative legal analysis of the criminal codes of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and other union republics, it was possible to identify general and special provisions inherent in the studied sources of Soviet criminal law in the period under study.Conclusions. Discussion issues during the development and adoption of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1922 were the principle of analogy, the concept of a crime and its signs and components, the definition of a counter-revolutionary crime. As a result of a comparative legal analysis of the criminal codes of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and other union republics, it was established that there was a reception of the main provisions, principles and concepts, which forms an identical conceptual and categorical apparatus characteristic of all Soviet criminal codes of the period under study. At the same time, the criminal codes of a number of Union republics were distinguished by a certain originality. Legal customs such as adats and Sharia norms were used as sources of criminal law. The socio-cultural specifics of the peoples who constituted the social basis of the union subjects of the Soviet federation were taken into account.