The State versus the People

What role did revolutionary tribunals play in spreading and consolidating Bolshevik rule during the civil war? How did tribunals fit into the fledgling Soviet justice system? What was their role in forging new Soviet citizens? These are the key questions that Matthew Rendle seeks to answer, aiming in six chapters to cover ‘all the activities of tribunals, and through these, their potential impact’ (p. 266). The book’s strongest contributions are of an empirical nature. Rendle ably lays out the creation of revolutionary tribunals and the relationship between them and people’s courts. Whereas people’s courts dealt with ‘regular crimes’, tribunals had the explicit task of fighting ‘counter-revolution’. Rendle also depicts the struggle for influence between tribunals and the secret police, or Cheka—which ran its own revolutionary tribunals to sentence embezzlement, bribery and forgery by officials during the civil war. He includes a detailed overview of official decrees, an informative discussion about

Criminology · Economic Justice · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · European history and politics · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Soviet and Russian History