This collection of essays explores the continuities and disruptions in the perceptions of criminality, its causes and ways of fighting it in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. It focuses on both the discourse on criminality and thus the conceptualisation of criminality in various disciplines (criminology, psychiatry, and literature), and penal practice, that is, different aspects of criminal law and anti-crime policy. Thus, the volume is markedly interdisciplinary, with authors representing a variety of approaches in history and literary studies, from social history to discourse analysis, from the history of sciences to text analysis.

Riccardo Nicolosi (PhD) is professor of Slavic literatures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. His latest publications explore the rhetorical and narrative interfaces between literature and science. Anne Hartmann (PhD) is an assistant researcher und lecturer in the Slavic department at the University of Bochum. In her current research she concentrates on Western intellectuals visiting the Stalinist USSR and on Soviet labour-camp literature.