Abstract:

This paper examines early Soviet “customary crimes” legislation in the interwar period, with a particular focus on its development in Kazakhstan. Early twentieth-century Kazakh activists addressed “custom” (adet-ghuryp) as a target for social reform, in conversation with wider global movements. After the formation of the Soviet Union, these reformist visions contributed to “customary crimes” decrees and laws. By the late 1920s, however, this legislation shifted from emphasizing “custom” as a marker of colonial disparities towards portraying it as the shadowy remains of a way of life that represented a threat to the viability and authority of the emerging bureaucratic state. Drawing from research into interwar Soviet archival and published sources, this paper argues that the change in Soviet legal terminology from “customary crimes” (in the 1924 RSFSR criminal code) to “crimes constituting survivals of the clan order (rodovoi byt)” (in the 1928 code) was not simply a matter of semantics. Instead, it marks a turn from previous (post)imperial reformist agendas to a repressive agenda that saw “custom” (and communities associated with it) as the shadowy remains of a way of life that represented a threat to the viability and authority of the emerging bureaucratic state.