This paper focuses attention on a little-noticed and even less-discussed chapter in the history of Soviet criminal law, namely, the introduction in 1961 of the death penalty for certain large-scale crimes against “socialist” (i.e., state and public) property. The Soviet recourse to the death penalty for economic crimes raises important moral, ideological, and philosophical questions. But the topic was inadequately examined during the Soviet period, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Now, unfortunately, it is in danger of being either forgotten or casually justified, as is evidenced by three significant publications of the past two decades:
(1) William Taubman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning political biography of Khrushchev, admirable in other respects, makes absolutely no mention of Khrushchev’s unprecedented introduction of the death penalty for crimes against property;
(2) Aleksei Adzhubei’s memoirs, pointedly entitled “Those Ten Years” (i.e., the decade 1954-1964 when his father-in-law Khrushchev was in power); although it discusses the famous Secret Speech (1956) and the Cuban missile crisis (1962), it is equally silent about this key element of Khrushchev’s rule;
(3) A Russian author who expresses nostalgia for the “socialist” Soviet Union, including its Stalinist period, makes casual mention (without mentioning Khrushchev) of the recourse in the 1960s to the death penalty for economic crimes, but goes on to offer an equally casual, and quite general, justification of this policy. He sees it as an example of the “traditionally Russian humane attitude toward the criminal”, representing a “reasonable approach, elicited by the need to defend society and the state from criminal elements”.