Fault in the Face of Crime: Rothenburg and Incarceration in the Soviet Union
During and directly following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the movement’s leaders eradicated traditional class structure, persecuting members of the upper class while dismissing the crimes of the proletariat. Daly claims that in order to reach equality of classes, “The Bolsheviks imposed a form of punishment on an entire population category, which they called ‘the bourgeois classes'” (Daly 87). Meanwhile, the other side of the class spectrum was pardoned for their crimes. These two very different experiences were the product of a 1919 Bolshevik criminal-law handbook that defines crime as “conditioned by social relations in a class-based society. Criminals were not individually responsible [...] but rather crime is conditioned by social status” (Daly 89). Following this conception of crime as a product of one’s background came freedom for the proletariat. The penal system’s focus had shifted from predominantly proletariat petty crime to the bourgeois and to crimes against the state. Bolsheviks determined crimes of thievery and even murder to be the fault of one’s social upbringing and not the individual, and therefore, persecution of petty criminals declined. “For most ordinary crimes,” Daly explains, “the code was lenient by prerevolutionary standards and closer to Western European practice of the time. The emphasis was on noncustodial punishments [...], shorter prison terms, compulsory work as a means to rehabilitate offenders, and a move away from retribution as the main goal of criminal justice” (Daly 98). Therefore, in early Soviet Russia, the penal system forgave many crimes of the proletariat. Even when the poor were persecuted, their sentences, like that of Rothenburg, were light and focused on labor and rehabilitation rather than punishment.
With this context of Bolshevik ideology, Rothenburg’s denying fault for his crimes is not so unreasonable. While inside the Soviet prison system, Bolshevik concepts shape his life and his understanding of his crimes. He continuously states, “Life had driven me to this,” reflecting the idea that his crimes are a result of his background (Zoshchenko 138, 145). Crime was just a product of an impoverished life, and, as Daly argues, it even became necessary for survival. He claims, “Prisons were systematically filled because it was hard to survive without engaging in criminal activity” (Daly 111). According to both Daly and Rothenburg, the life of crime is simply the life that many impoverished Soviet citizens were forced to live. The only ones who could accept fault for their crimes were wealthy citizens, as they had profitable and legal means of survival and prosperity. Rothenburg would only have been at fault if “[he] had the chance of another life and still went on thieving” (Zoshchenko 145). In accordance with early Soviet ideology, Rothenburg’s impoverished upbringing is to blame for his crimes, and he would only have been at fault had he come from a bourgeois background.
Much of the sympathy for the proletariat, however, ended with Stalin’s rise to power. With the height of his regime’s atrocities in the early 1930s came the persecution of not only the bourgeois and criminals against the state, but also ordinary criminals like Rothenburg. Under Stalin’s totalitarian regime, peasants doing nothing more than collecting grain remnants after a harvest faced severe punishment, including the death penalty (Daly 106). Why was this the case? How had the courts gone from overlooking “ordinary criminality” to prescribing capital punishment for the smallest of actions? This shift came with the ever-increasing vigilance of the state against potential threats to the system’s security. Daly explains, “Stalin specifically linked ordinary criminality with class war and counterrevolution […] one can argue that Stalin purposely politicized ordinary crime as the latest “front” on which to fight against the enemies of socialism and Soviet power” (108). In this increasingly vigilant state, even previously-overlooked “ordinary criminality” had become more serious than it was before the Bolshevik Revolution. Any illegal action was a crime against the Soviet Regime, and was therefore just as punishable as a political crime. By 1933, even talking to the wrong person could be considered a crime against the state. Fortunately, some ordinary criminals still did not face this intense persecution, but thieves did not fall into this category of leniency. Daly explains the punishment of different types of petty crimes, saying, “Many ordinary criminals still benefited from the policy of lenient punishments, especially noncustodial obligatory labor...Meanwhile, local officials still condemned peasants to relatively harsh punishments for petty theft” (111). Here, there is some consistency with early Soviet views on ordinary crime, but Rothenburg, who at this time was doing hard labor on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, was not as likely to face such leniency for his crimes.
Once Rothenburg returned to the Soviet Union from Greece, he faced one minor arrest after another until he landed upon hard labor on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, Stalin’s proposed man-made waterway forged by tens of thousands of prisoners. Here, our narrator’s three-year sentence turned into a year and a half with good behavior. By this point, he was a seasoned criminal. His record was extensive, and at a time when Stalin equated ordinary criminals with class war, Rothenburg was, by Stalin’s terms, a huge threat. This was no secret to the state. Yet, at a time when peasants were facing the death penalty for collecting grain after a harvest, a man who made a lifelong living off of crime made off with only a one-and-a-half-year sentence of hard labor. Daly and Rothenburg’s histories lack alignment with Rothenburg’s light punishment for his lifetime of theft during a regime that Daly describes as ruthless towards petty criminals. The narrator of “History of the Man Reforged” does not go into much detail on his understanding of how the state typically dealt with thieves and criminals of his nature, but with his positivity towards the Soviet collective and the power of the workforce, he seems to have had a much more positive experience with the penal system than Daly’s subjects. While Rothenburg’s denial of fault echoes Daly’s history of the early Soviet Union’s sympathy towards the proletariat, his sentence is surprisingly light given Stalin’s sentiment towards ordinary crime in the 1930s.
Why might Rothenburg have made off with such a light sentence and positive experience? Perhaps after a lifetime of deceiving, Rothenburg was so good at lying that he could deceive the G.P.U. Perhaps the records of his crimes prior to his reentry to the Soviet Union were not available. Or, so many crimes and individuals to investigate, it is possible that his crimes slipped, unnoticed, through the G.P.U.’s fingers. Regardless of the cause for this divergence, it is impossible to expect every account of incarceration under Stalin’s regime to be consistent with the general history of the period.
It is also highly possible that Zoshchenko curated a story that was palatable to the public as Soviet propaganda. He notes at the beginning that he altered Rothenburg’s account to make it more palatable to the reader, saying, “These were dead tissues that needed to be revived with the breath of literature” (Zoshchenko 128). Who is to say that he did not also give the story the breath of nationalism by curating a story that feigns forgiveness and hope for Soviet citizens? After all, the state would likely only allow for positive accounts of the prison system to be published, suggesting that Rothenburg’s story was, in fact, told as Soviet propaganda. The inconsistency between his sentence and Daly’s history of the Soviet penal system does not necessarily mean either source is wrong. A single story of an individual cannot voice the history of the masses, especially when that voice was potentially altered to favor the Soviet system. With that being said, there is no way to know for certain just how accurate or inaccurate this source is, but it does explain why Rothenburg may have felt so little fault for crimes that reaped so little punishment and such positivity towards the Soviet labor system.
The possibility that this narrative was altered to become propaganda reinforces the importance that we read such sources with a critical eye in hopes of learning the true impact of Soviet imprisonment. At a time when writers hid their experiences in drawers out of fear of imprisonment, censorship had such a stifling hold that many writers likely edited their stories out of fear. We as readers must consider how this impacts their stories and how history interprets them. It is important to consider pieces like “History of the Man Reforged” in their historical context, rather than accepting them as fact without understanding how they fit into (or diverge from) others’ stories. No matter the degree of Zoshchenko’s edits and what the cause may have been for Rothenburg’s lack of remorse and lenient sentence, his supports Daly’s account of early Bolshevik ideals and contradicts it at the rise of Stalin’s totalitarianism.
Works Cited
Daly, Jonathan. Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Zoshchenko, Mikhail. “Rothenburg or the History of the Man Reforged.” Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, edited by Maxim Gorky, Amabel Williams-Ellis, and Leopold Averbakh, Hyperion Press, 1977.