‘Brutal crimes are a result of brutal policies’ Criminologist Yakov Gilinsky on a life spent navigating war, crime, and state censorship
In the early 1970s, criminologist and lawyer Yakov Gilinsky became the first Soviet academic to study deviantology — the study of deviant behavior and its causes. He was the first researcher in the USSR to study how socioeconomic factors influence crime and suicide rates. Today, Gilinsky continues to teach and work in St. Petersburg. Bumaga spoke with Gilinsky about the likely effects of the war, his childhood in besieged Leningrad, and how he and his colleagues evaded the Soviet censors. With Bumaga’s permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of the interview.
Academia was one of the sectors most immediately and most severely affected by the hastening of Russia’s authoritarian turn after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — especially the social sciences. The disappearance of foreign partnerships and residence programs abroad, along with widespread self-censorship and a decent amount of explicit censorship, have made it difficult for independent-minded scholars to work.
For most Russian researchers over 60 or so, though, restrictive working conditions are nothing new. 88-year-old Yakov Gilinsky, for example, worked for decades as a criminologist in the Soviet Union — a country that was officially free of crime.
While studying at Leningrad State University, Gilinsky received some useful advice from one of his professors, Mikhail Shargorodsky: “You can write whatever you want. But in the foreword, you have to refer to Comrade Lenin, and in the afterword, you have to mention the most recent Community Party Congress.”
Gilinsky followed that recipe a few times for his early works, but he didn’t like the dishonesty — plus, it wasn’t always enough to get his research published.
“In Leningrad, and in the RSFSR, you weren’t allowed to publish any numbers, including statistics or research findings, so we usually published our articles in Estonia,” he said.
Gilinsky’s research interests included crime as well as “deviant behavior,” including drug addiction, prostitution, and suicide. He studied, and continues to study, the link between criminal legislation and the behavior it aims to reduce.
“Nobody [in Russia] thinks about the peculiarities of postmodern society, such as how they influence crime and suicide, or how socioeconomic inequality affects those things,” Gilinsky said. According to his research and that of most other criminologists, certain types of laws almost inevitably lead to a rise in murder, suicide, and theft — and that's a bad sign for Russia’s near future.
Summoning the executioner
According to Gilinsky, there’s currently a global trend of countries decriminalizing as many things as possible. Though it might seem counterintuitive, he said, decriminalizing an act rarely leads to an increase in that act.
“When people make a decision to do something, they don’t look at the criminal code first,” he said.” The last thing they’re thinking about is whether there’s a law against something; they don’t even think of the punishment. That’s why the German professor Jescheck, one of the foremost authorities on criminal law in Germany [...] wrote about the necessity of abolishing criminal law as something incompatible with human and civil rights.”
Russia, of course, is a glaring exception: in addition to lawmakers criminalizing various kinds of speech, the country’s withdrawal (and expulsion) from the Council of Europe in March paved the way for a revision of its decades-old moratorium on the death penalty. The effects of that revision, Gilinsky, would be “numerous and far-reaching.”
“[First of all,] they would start sentencing undesirable people to it [the death penalty]. And [secondly,] as statistics show, the rate of serious crimes would grow.”
The perverse effects of the death penalty, Gilinsky said, are well-established — and a number of sociological and legal thinkers throughout the centuries have asserted that its internal logic is unsound from a justice perspective.
“Cesare Beccaria wrote about this in the 18th century,” said Gilinsky. “According to him, brutal crimes are the result of brutal state policies. ‘I don’t understand,’ he wrote, ‘how a government trying to curtail murder can commit murder itself.’ Karl Marx, too, wrote about the inadmissibility of the death penalty and the consequences of brutal punishments, using statistics. In one of his works, he used numbers to show how when an execution for a crime is carried out, there’s a spike in that same crime. Brutality from the state leads to brutality among the people.”
The pattern has held true in more recent centuries as well. “Argentina and Austria were some of the first countries to abolish the death penalty [which they did in the 20th century]. In both countries, the rates of the crimes that had previously been punishable by death went down,” said Gilinsky. “In Russia, the last death sentence was carried out in 1996. From 2001 to 2021, the murder rate decreased by a factor of 4.6. Do we really want to reinstate the death penalty?”
If Russian lawmakers were really concerned with reducing crime, according to Gilinsky, a more effective strategy would be to pass legislation aimed at reducing inequality. After all, he said, most crimes are committed by people without a stable income source.
“All of humanity and the population of every single country is divided into people who are included in social, economic, political, and cultural life, and people who are excluded from it. [...] The excluded make up the main social base of deviant behavior, because when people find themselves excluded, they’re more likely to die by suicide, commit a crime, turn to alcohol or drugs, and so on.”
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Missed opportunities
Gilinsky was born in 1934. Some of his earliest memories are of the Siege of Leningrad; he was in the city itself for the entirety. He recalls bodies in his building’s stairwell and shrapnel falling to the ground, but, while the experience did leave him a pacifist, he said it didn’t leave him with any great lessons to pass on to the younger generation.
“It’s impossible [for them] to understand. Right now, when I think about the blockade, it sometimes feels to me like it didn’t even happen,” he said. “In the 1941-1942 academic year, I entered the first grade. I really didn’t like school, and I disliked children even more — I tried my best not to talk to them. For me, my comrades in the first grade were scarier than the German bombings and shellings.”
Gilinsky spent his childhood devouring books. After some difficulty enrolling in university due to state-sponsored anti-Semitism, he finally managed to enroll in Leningrad State University’s law department after Stalin’s death.
Thus began a career full of endless workarounds and rule-bending. For decades, Gilinsky engaged as much as possible with the research his foreign colleagues were doing. In the 1970s, he established the field of “deviantology,” or the study of deviant behavior from a legal and social science perspective, in the USSR, and has since been known as the father of the field in Russia.
Gilinsky has also been a fairly outspoken advocate of LGBT rights for decades. He recalled the Christopher Street Day demonstrations — analogous to pride parades — on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt in the Gorbachev years. The current climate for LGBT rights in Russia, he said, is a far cry from even the openness of the 1980s.
“This is a frightening moment,” Gilinsky said. “There’s a return to pre-revolutionary, imperial attitudes. We’ve already gone far back into the 16th or 17th centuries in terms of political positions. This [state-sponsored homophobia] is one of them.”
One of the more positive 21st-century changes he’s witnessed has been Russia’s crime reduction, which is part of a global trend.
“I can say with certainty that the turning point occurred in 2001-2006. In 2001, the rates of murder and other severe crimes went down, and in 2006, we saw it with all the other crimes: there was a decline in theft, burglaries, and robberies by a factor of somewhere between six and ten,” Gilinsky said.
But he expects the days of increasing safety may be over.
“As I’ve already said, most of the people who have committed the crimes in the criminal code are people without permanent income sources. As a result, the economic crisis and unemployment will have an effect. Though we have to remember that this is hypothetical,” he said.
While crime didn’t start falling until the aughts, Gilinsky said the 1990s were the only decade when he felt “completely free” living in Russia — and he wishes he had left when he still felt able.
“When it was possible to travel anywhere, write anything, and publish anything, what reason was there to leave? Despite all of the authorities’ mistakes, we had freedom. And now it’s too late — it’s beyond us,” he said.
He has one piece of advice for younger Russians:
“Leave. Russia has no prospects for the next several generations.”
Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale