Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Information Agency. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Midwest Workshop of Russian Historians at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. I wish to thank the participants in the workshop and Dagmar Herzog for their comments.

1. For some of the better known examples, see Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Bray, Barbara (New York: G. Braziller, 1978)Google Scholar; Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, trans. John, and Tedeschi, Anne (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982 Google Scholar; Davis, Natalie Zemon, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 Google Scholar. See also Rowe, G. S., “Black Offenders, Criminal Courts, and Philadelphia Society in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 22 (Summer 1989): 685–712 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnold, Marybeth Hamilton, ‘ “The Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman': Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790-1820,” in Peiss, Kathy and Simmons, Christina, eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 57–69.Google Scholar

2. See Gzovski, Vladimir, Soviet Civil Law: Private Rights and Their Background under the Soviet Regime, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Law School, 1948-9)Google Scholar; Harold, Berman, Justice in Russia: An Interpretation of Soviet Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950 Google Scholar; Kucherov, Samuel, The Organs of Soviet Administration of Justice: Their History and Operation (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970)Google Scholar; Juviler, Peter, Revolutionary Law and Order: Politics and Social Change in the USSR (New York: Free Press, 1976 Google Scholar; Sharlet, Robert, “Pashukanis and the Rise of Soviet Marxist Jurisprudence, 1924-1930,” Soviet Union, 1, part 2 (1974): 103–21Google Scholar; Sharlet, Robert, “Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture,” in Tucker, Robert C., ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 155–79Google Scholar; Huskey, Eugene, Russian Lawyers and the Soviet State: The Origins and Development of the Soviet Bar, 1917-1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. For two exceptions, see Bailes, Kendall E., Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 69–121 Google Scholar; and McAuley, Mary, Labour Disputes in Soviet Russia, 1957-1965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969 Google Scholar, espec. 139-248.

4. William G. Rosenberg, “Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October,” Slavic Review 44, no. 2 (1985): 213-38.

5. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 4.

6. For the state's encouragement of such expectations, termed “state socialism” by a prominent factory inspector, see Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 126.

7. The protocols of six Petrograd factory committees were published as Akademiia nauk SSSR, Institut istorii SSSR, Fabrichno-zavodskie komitety Petrograda v 1917 godu. Protokoly (2 vols., Moscow: Nauka, 1979-82). See especially, 1: 111, 206, 233-4, 266; 2: 37, 53, 61, 146, 163-4, 271-2, 275, 535, 587-8. Caught with a bottle of kerosene on leaving the Petrograd Cartridge Factory on 16 October 1917, Ivan Kuz'min, an electrician, explained that he lived outside the city, had not been able to procure kerosene for two weeks, but acknowledged his guilt and pleaded to be excused for his offense. The same search uncovered a piece of soap on Aleksandr Kandrygin, who testified that “I was given soap in the workshop to wash my hands, I divided it into two pieces, left one in the shop and took the other with me to wash at home [because] I could not obtain any in the stores, … not thinking that I was committing an offense. I ask to be pardoned for my offense.” See ibid., 1: 261-2.

8. For examples, see Fabrichno-zavodskie komitety Petrograda, 1: 233; Smith, S. A., ed., Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy (The October Revolution and the Factory Committees), (Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1983), 1: 121; 2: 171Google Scholar. For evidence that such language was not confined to bolsheviks but was employed by mensheviks as well, see Smith, S. A., Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 89–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Ocherednye zadachi professional'nykh soiuzov. Pervoe tsirkuliarnoe pis'mo VTsSPS, (Moscow: VTsSPS, 1918), 78-80.

10. Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Moskovskoi Oblasti [TsGAMO], f. 627, op. 1, d. 74, 11. 3-4.

11. During the 1905-1907 revolution the railroad comrades courts were the most numerous and their statutes the most elaborate. See Iu. la. Vol'dman, “Tovarishcheskie sudy v Rossii do Velikoi Oktiabrskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii,” Nauchnyi trudy Omskoi Vysshei shkoly militsii MVD SSSR, 1972, vo. 10, 177-79, 184; P. la. Iakorskii, “Tovarishcheskie sudy v period revoliutsii 1905-1907 gg.,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, Ser. x (Pravo) no. 4 (1964): 57-60.

12. Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Oktiabr'skoi Revoliutsii [TsGAOR], f. 5474, op. 1, d. 100, 11. 1-6; Zheleznodorozhnik, no. 7-8 (1919): 58, 69-72; P. la. Iakorskii, “Organizatsiia i deiatel'nost’ tovarishchestkikh sudov v pervye gody Sovetskoi vlasti (1917-1922 gg.),” Candidate's Dissertation, Voronezh, 1966, 34, 90-100; N. G. Ermicheva, “Stanovlenie zakonodatel'stva o distsiplinarnoi otvetstvennosti rabotnikov zh.d. transporta (oktiabr’ 1917-1930 gg.),” Vestnik Leningradskogo universiteta, no. 17 (1973) (Seriia “Ekonomika, filosofiia, pravo,” vyp. 3): 114-17.

13. Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krest'ianskogo pravitel'stva, no. 56 (1919): 537.

14. For the Instructions, see Tovarishcheskii distsiplinarnyi sud, (Khar'kov, 1921), 10-18; the revised statutes were published in Tovarishcheskie distsiplinarnye sudy (Polozhenie i instruktsii) (Moscow, VTsSPS, 1921). 15. Tekstil'shchik, no. 1 (1921): 7-8. For other complaints, see TsGAOR, f. 5457, op. 4, d. 45, 11. 13-14; f. 5459, op. 2, d. 80, 1. 31. The organizational and procedural shortcomings of the courts were discussed in periodic reports of court presidents as well as the protocols of provincial union council sessions. For 1920, see TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 4, d. 73; d. 98; d. 106; d. I l l ; 143. For 1921, see TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 524.

16. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 286, 1. 178.

17. Nor is it possible within the confines of this article to investigate the social composition of judges and different degrees of activism (which were considerable) from one region and union to another. For a report of the Southern Bureau of VTsSPS referring to opposition among workers in “some metalworks enterprises and the majority of textile mills” to the organization of disciplinary courts and the necessity of appointing judges from among factory committees and shop heads, see TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 525, 1. 166.

18. A comparison between the number of people brought before the courts and figures on the source of the charges shows a discrepancy of 4, 450; the total for “results of cases” is in excess of the number brought before the courts by 101; 174 of those convicted are unaccounted for in the totals for sentences; and minor discrepancies exist in the tabulations for each column.

19. In the first nine months of 1921, 75.6 percent of cases heard by uezd courts involved absenteeism as compared to 54.7 percent among guberniia courts. S. Iozefovich, “Distsiplinarnye tovarishcheskie sudy,” Vestnik truda, no. 13-14 (18-19; 1922): 59.

20. For the most recent—and best—discussion of Soviet food supply policy during this period, see Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

21. TsGAOR, f. 5469, op. 3, d. 144, 1. 3; d. 166, 11. 2-3, 9-12, 17, 24, 27; f. 5451, op. 3, d. 76, 1. 21.

22. Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krest'ianskogo pravitel'stva, no. 8 (1920): 49. From the summer of 1920, punitive powers were also exercised by enterprise-based commissions for the realization of labor conscription (komistrudy) which answered to the Main Commission for the Struggle Against Labor Desertion (Glavkomtrud). For a(n unadopted) scheme developed by Glavkomtrud which would have distinguished between “truancy without explanation” and “hidden truancy,” and appropriate penalties, see TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 4, d. 288, 11. 17-19. For a reliable guide through the bureaucratic maze, see Iakorskii, “Organizatsiia i deiatel'nost',” 195-206. For English translations of several key decrees, see James Bunyan, ed., The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917-1921: Documents and Materials (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 110-14, 165-70.

23. K. Egorov, Moskovskie tovarishcheskie distsiplinarnye sudy za 1920 god (Materialy k X s “ezdu R.K. P. i IV-mu s “ezdu profsoiuzov) (Moscow: M.G.S.P.S., 1921), 9-11. Egorov is drawing on his own report which can be found in TsGAMO, f. 180, d. 208, 11. 168-80.

24. It should not be assumed that forced labor with deprivation of freedom, which is really what confinement in a camp involved, was the most severe of sentences and still less that, as Richard Pipes has argued, the camps constituted “Bolshevism's major contribution to the political practices of the twentieth century” along with the oneparty state and an omnipotent political police. See his The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), 832. For a report by the Moscow Soviet's administrative department on the six camps located in Moscow, see TsGAMO, f. 66, op. 1, d. 277, 11. 22-28.

25. It is also noteworthy that of the nineteen individuals who presided over the unions’ Moscow guberniia courts, only one, Maria Vasil'evna Ivanova of the Tobacco Workers’ Union, was a woman (although her court's rate of conviction—94.3 percent— was among the highest of any). TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 293, 1. 139; TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5. ed. kh. 719, 1. 92.

26. Indeed, the main building of this factory—the future Stalin Automobile Works (ZIS)—was not completed until the mid-1920s. See Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), ’ 133; and S. V. Voronkova, “Stroitel'stvo avtomobil'nykh zavodov v Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914-1917 gody),” Istoricheskie zapiski 75 (1965): 147-69.

27. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 298, 11. 24-39.

28. Ibid., 11. 17-22.

29. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 289a, 1. 163.

30. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 289, 1. 41.

31. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Donetskoi oblasti [GADO], f. 2070, op. 1, d. 3, 1. 82.

32. GADO, f. 2070, op. 1, d. 3, 11. 6-8.

33. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xi.

34. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 289, 1. 246. Ironically, Drogunov was sentenced to be transferred to the Department of Accounting and Distribution of Labor for reassignment to work in the fields!

35. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 299, 11. 282-4. For a case in which this sort of appeal was contested by an administrator, see TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 288, 1. 700. “Family” could be appropriated idiomatically to refer to all workers as was the case in an article describing the punitive powers of the courts as ranging from warnings to “expulsion from the workers’ family and assignment to concentration camps as a parasite.” L'vin, 'Tovarishcheskie distsiplinarnye sudy i ikh znachenie,” Trud i distsiplina (Iaroslavl’), no. 1 (1920): 7. See also the poem, “Za trud!” which contains the line, “Druzhnoi my seichas sem'ei.” in Trud i distsiplina (Tsaristyn), no. 1 (1920): 3. Diane Koenker has noted that later in the 1920s the “worker family” began to replace the idiom of class in the main journal of the printing trades. See Diane Koenker, “Class and Class Consciousness in a Socialist Society: Workers in the Printing Trades during NEP,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 53.

36. TsGAMO, f. 627, op. 2, d. 197, 11. 74-9. It is useful to compare this incident with others that did not come before the disciplinary courts. A strike in July 1921 at the Sokolov Weaving Mill, a “militarized shock factory,” ended when workers signed a statement committing them to abide by the union's instructions in return for the union's promise to “take all possible measures to ease the situation of workers with respect to the supply of food and articles of mass consumption.” TsGAMO, f. 627, op. 2, d. 341, 1. 147. By contrast, the strike in July 1920 at the Tula Gun Works, which was accompanied by demands for the Red Army ration and a halt to the registration of workers’ wives for compulsory labor service, resulted in ferocious repression via a revolutionary tribunal and the “filtration” in rehiring. See Organizatsiia truda (Tula), no. 1 (1920): 8-9.

37. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 207, 11. 484-5. The sentence imposed by the court required workers to provide four hours of unpaid labor spread over two days.

38. TsGAOR, f. 5457, op. 4, d. 60, 11. 40-46. The central committee investigated the matter but resolved that “[discipline is obligatory for all citizens.” Perhaps it was some compensation to Vaniushina that later in 1921 both Dolgov and Zhitenev were brought before the disciplinary court on unrelated charges and the latter received a sentence of one month's forced labor. Ibid., 1. 54; TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 526, 1. 76.

39. TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 525, 11. 172-80.

40. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 289a, 1. 183. Italics in the original.

41. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 288, 11. 765-68; d. 289a, 11. 59-68; d. 288, 11. 676-91. According to the head of the “Dom Lisheniia Svobody,” Netrusov “worked honestly and without trouble” during his confinement.

42. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 296, 1. 296.

43. Ibid., 11. 302-3.

44. S. A. Smith refers to it and other issues of coarse and brutal treatment as “a potent leaven fermenting class consciousness” before 191? but adds that “it was strongly inflected by power relations based on gender, age, and ethnicity.” See his “Workers and Supervisors: Changing Relations and Representations—St. Petersburg, 1906-17 and Shanghai, 1895-1927,” in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald G. Suny, eds., The Making of the Soviet Working Class, (forthcoming). The issue did not die after the revolution. In July 1922, Trotsky was horrified to read in Izvestiia that commanding officers were using the familiar form when addressing soldiers. See Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life and Other Writings on Culture and Science (New York: Monad Press, 1973), 77-78.

45. TsGAMO, f. 627, op. 2, d. 197, 11. 145-52.

46. See Iavorskii, “Organizatsiia i deiatel'nost',” 320-38; Iozefovich, “Distsiplinarnye tovarishcheskie sudy,” 63; E. I. Filippov, htoriia tovarishcheskikh sudov v RSFSR (Rostov -na-Donu, 1982), 16-22.

47. Egorov, Moskovskie tovarishcheskie sudy, 17.

48. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 296, 11. 278, 290 obv. The case was heard in August 1921.

49. Iakorskii, “Organizatsiia i deiatel'nost',” 327.

50. See Biulleten’ VTsSPS, no. 1 (32; 1922): 4.

51. Maiakovskii charged in a lengthy and highly entertaining letter to the court that Gosizdat had tried to block the publication of the play, “Misteriia Buff,” and then when it did appear in the journal Vestnik teatra, refused to release funds to pay him his honorarium. Khinchuk was accused of having insulted a journalist who had written an expose in Trud ( “Cooperation and Commercial Exchange,” 28 August 1921) alleging graft in the distribution of goods through the offices of Tsentrosoiuz. Litkens had to answer charges brought by the students and faculty of the Academy of Labor Education that the Commissar had failed to provide the school with adequate food, heating and books, and then closed it down. See respectively, TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 296, 11. 1-118; TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 525, 11. 2-5; Ibid., 11. 184, 201-2.

52. Cited in Filippov, Istoriia tovarishcheskikh sudov, 22.

53. TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 524, 1. 76. The revised statutes of 5 April 1921 had granted to the Commissariat the right of representation in an advisory capacity at all sessions of guberniia courts.

54. TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 286, 11. 185, 252. See also the resolution adopted by the Economic Department of VTsSPS on 19 November 1921 in TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 524, 1. 11. As late as 17 December 1921 Egorov and other representatives from Moscow held an extraordinary meeting with their counterparts from Petrograd and resolved that the role of the courts under NEP should remain as before (TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 525, 1. 60).

55. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966) 2: 213-4.

56. See Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “The Bolsheviks’ Dilemma: Class, Culture, and Politics in Early Soviet Years,” Slavic Review 47, no. 4 (1988): 599–613 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and comments by Suny, Ronald Grigor and Orlovsky, Daniel in the same issue; Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “New Perspectives on the Civil War,” in Koenker, Diane P., Rosenberg, William G., and Suny, Ronald Grigor, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 3–23.Google Scholar

57. On the iconography, see Victoria Bonnell, “The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art,” in The Making of the Soviet Working Class; on pageants, see Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams, Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 83–100 Google Scholar; on Proletkul't, Mally, Lynn, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar; on production propaganda, Larin, Iu., Proizvodstvennaia propaganda i sovetskoe khoziaistvo na rubezhe 4-go goda (doklad na s “ezde politprosvetov 4 noia. 1920 g.) (Moscow: Gosizd., 1920)Google Scholar, and TsGAOR, f. 5451, op. 5, d. 115, 1. 35; f. 5457, op. 5, d. 79, 1. 7; d. 101, 1. 7.

58. Organizatsiia truda, no. 13 (25; 1921): 16-17; no. 5-6 (17-18; 1921): 12-14. Jeffrey Brooks has noted that the “ideal of self-sacrifice as a denial of personal needs and interests” was a prominent theme in Pravda's representation of individual identities in the 1920s. See Jeffrey Brooks, “Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s,” in Stephen White, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 31-32.

59. Ranciere, Jacques, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France, trans. Drury, John (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.Google Scholar

60. For some limited comparisons, see Filippov, Istoriia tovarishcheskikh sudov, 24-39; Berman, Harold and Spindler, James, “Soviet Comrades’ Courts,” Washington Law Review 38 (1963): 842–910 Google Scholar; Butler, William, “Comradely Justice Revised,” Review of Socialist Law 3, no. 3 (1977); 325–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. “We might … define social courts as institutions for handling disputes that are embedded in a social field, in which the parties themselves take an active role in the proceedings, and in which the third-party intervener … is not a legal professional, but rather a member (or members) of the local community.” Hayden, Robert M., Social Courts in Theory and Practice: Yugoslav Workers’ Courts in Comparative Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 11–12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hayden's ethnographic analysis of the Yugoslav “courts of associated labor” links them to that country's experiment with self-management. On the KTS, see McAuley, Labour Disputes in Soviet Russia, 129-203; and van den Berg, Ger P., “Judicial Settlement of Individual Labor Disputes in the Soviet Union,” Review of Socialist Law 9, no. 2 (1983): 125–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. Jacques Ranciere, quoted in Reid, Donald, “The Night of the Proletarians, Deconstruction and Social History,” Radical History Review, nos. 28-30 (1984): 454.Google Scholar