During the “Great Terror” of the 1930’s, Joseph Stalin had hundreds of thousands of people given trials, and convicted of trumped up charges. Most of these poor souls wound up with a bullet in the head…or sent to prison camps in Siberia.
Was anyone ever found “not guilty”?
Not that Stalin ever cared, but I could imagine some top general or scientist, whose loss would have been a major blow to the Soviet regime, being spared through some high intervention.
Or was you goose pretty much cooked, once your name was on the list?
Not the golden boys.
Nikolai Luzin was convicted, but never arrested or deported. It was pretty much like you speculated; people close to Stalin convinced him Luzin was a good mathematician and the charges were a personal vendetta, and Stalin didn’t care about anyone who wasn’t a threat politically.
in Soviet Russia there were no “not guilty” in the Western sense, not under Stalin and not afterwards. In a criminal trial if they were tired of you (let’s say the police were clearly bullshitting without evidence) people would usually get released without being explicitly declared “not guilty”. The fact that the guy so released was under prosecution remained in the dossier and hurt his career regardless of the fact that the case was thrown out.
Back to Stalin, yes, some people (including political prisoners) were released from prison without ever going to the camps and others went to the camps for a few years and then got released and went home. Death rates in prison camps really varied by location, by time period (we are talking about a 30 years period, an entire historical era) etc. Also, some people served their sentences in prison and not in the camp.
A good way to be released was to withstand torture without signing the demanded “confession”. If the investigator got tired of it, in many cases people were either released or else got lighter sentences and less subsequent career damage than those who “confessed”.
The number of people executed in prisons (on the order of several hundred thousands) is usually thought to be fairly small, percentagewise, compared with deaths in the camps.
Considering that most of the accused were charged with being part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, I would think speaking up in defense of anyone who had been accused was a quick way to get accused of being part of the same conspiracy.
Nonsense.
Acquittal rates even in Stalin’s purges were around 10%. This is significantly lower than the acquittal rates in Western judicial systems, but still higher than the current rates in post-Soviet Russia. The state-owned Russian news agency openly admits this.
Outside the purges acquittal rates were high enough that there was debate among Western scholars about how fair the Soviet criminal justice system really was. At some times and in some jurisdictions, jury trials were instituted, and a finding of “not guilty” could not be appealed by the prosecution. By the 1980s, over a third of all criminal trials resulted in an acquittal or charges dropped. (See Friedrich Christian Schroeder, “Perestroika and developments in Soviet criminal law”, in The Emancipation of Soviet Law.)
Certainly there were rampant abuses of the criminal justice system. Even a finding of “not guilty” could get you thrown in prison, as was the case with many politically motivated findings of criminal insanity. But the situation wasn’t nearly as dire as you make it out to be.
Another article discussing acquittal rates in the Soviet Union, and on the various alternatives to acquittals used by Soviet criminal courts, is “The Case of the Vanishing Acquittal: Informal Norms and the Practice of Soviet Criminal Justice” by Peter H. Solomon, Jr. in Soviet Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4, October 1987. Just as in the West, Soviet judges were often reluctant to render acquittals for fear it might reflect negatively upon them, and so reached some other accommodation with the defence, such as dropping the charges on some technicality, reducing the charges, or convicting the accused but reducing or suspending the sentence. Thus, while the number of outright acquittals may have been low (less than 2% in the 1960s), that doesn’t mean that remaining cases were uniformly unfavourable to the defendant.
I found this story, but can’t vouch for accuracy, The figures claimed are:
In China, Japan and South Korea, conviction rates are greater than 99%. In Taiwan, about 88%. In the US, estimates vary, federal crimes have a roughly 80% conviction rate.
That cite is unclear. It refers to the rate of acquitals during the time period of Stalin’s purges, but it’s not at all clear that this rate refers to political trials versus criminal trials that happened to take place at that same time. I rather suspect that the rate of acquitals in the political trials may have been a lot lower.
do you understand the difference between “acquittal” and “charges dropped”? If you want to argue that there were a lot of cases of the former, show me the evidence. Like I said, plenty of people got released / “charges dropped” / etc. Doesn’t mean that they were “not guilty” and comrade prosecutor made a serious mistake, does it?
I didn’t say the situation was “dire” either. The people running this system were not in the business of turning the land into a desolate wilderness, although neither did they care much about economic damage of their actions. People by and large survived that particular era of Russian history… except for the ones that didn’t :eek:
Correct. Political trials were a separate animal from criminal. The msot important difference was that guilt or innocence wasn’t the issue. The sole important aspect was whether or not the court wanted to find you guilty. That is, did the Powers That Were decide you ought to be punished or not.
Now and then, people were let go, but generally they didn’t have a trial in that case. You were simply held, maybe tortured or made miserable and then sent home just because. They might pick you up again later unless there was a good reason not to. At times, even the most obnoxious secret police ran into stupidity so blatant they couldn’t tolerate it, and people who were openly argumentative were often respected. Many scientists who refused to compromise their principles on Lysnekoism did well and were never punished, both because they were useful and because an open annoyance was less of a threat than the secret “wreckers”. But those without connections were indeed just sent away if accused, because they had no protection at all and no one to use influence for them, and factual guilt wasn’t an issue - wasn’t even relevant.
That is, quite literally, the definition of Red Terror as given by the COmmunists themselves. The point was not the catch actual lawbreaking or treason, but to create a permanent climate of total fear and obedience.