굴라그 귀환자들과 흐루쇼프 하의 소련 사회

This paper aims to review critically Miriam Dobson’s 2009 monograph, <Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin>. In her book, Dobson analyzes in detail the impact of Gulag returnees on the Soviet society and the reformations in the Soviet criminal justice system. She divides the reign of Khrushchev into three periods. The first period is from 1953 to 1959, when the mass release of Gulag prisoners according to amnesties, sentence reductions, and rehabilitations brought about the widespread fear about the growing crimes among Soviet citizens. However, the new Soviet leadership hold optimism, blaming Stalin for his “cult of personality” in 1956 and continuing the release of Gulag inmates. During the second period from 1959 to 1961, the Soviet authorities tried to vitalize volunteer militia brigades(<druzhiny>), comrades’ courts and guardianship(<poruka>), whose purposes were to mobilize the Soviet public into actively reforming misbehaving individuals via community efforts. But these experiments failed soon, so that the Soviet citizens began again to demand that more severe punishment should be given to criminals including the former prisoners from Gulag. The last period, 1961 and after, is characterized by the fact that the new Soviet leadership gave up the policy of “reeducation” of the criminals through the pressure of community. Instead, the Soviet authorities started to emphasize the complete isolation of the criminals from the Soviet society. However, Dobson’s thesis reveals some problems which should be settled by further research. She often uses materials only in favor of supporting her arguments, ignoring others which are against her reasoning. Furthermore, some facts which were used to make her points clear can be fully refuted by recent other studies.