A Society of Thieves? Property and Socialism Under Stalin

Professor Cadiot will present findings from her book, in which she explores the construction of socialist property as a juridical category, the economic landscape and practices in the Soviet Union, especially after the Second World War, and the work of law enforcement agencies. The book is based on archives from the Soviet State, Communist Party, Procuracy and Supreme court in Moscow and Kiev. It engages the question of the construction of a new property regime under Stalin, and the principle of protection of socialist property, redefining the value of things and their usages. Cadiot uses various methodologies and sources in order to give a place to the litigants. Notably, through microhistory and the use of ego documents, the archives of trials and letters of punished thieves, the book attends  to the voices of the thieves in order to understand how they made sense of their actions, and their punishment. The book offers a vivid image of the economic and social tensions in the USSR at the end of the war, the spread of illegal activities, and the difficulty for the government and the Party to discipline the society. In making use of references to Early modern history, the book sheds light on the oddities of the late Stalin penal system and the vitality of Soviet citizen in trying to redefine the relationships between the Party State and society, using tools of patronage, clientelism and corruption for fashioning a peculiar late Stalin political culture and penal system.

Juliette Cadiot is full professor of history in Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of Le laboratoire impérial, Russie-URSS, 1860-1940 with CNRS éditions (in Russian, Labotaraja Imperii, NLO, 2010), a book on issues of language in the USSR (Cacophonie d’Empire, with Dominique Arel and Larissa Zakharova, Cnrs éditions) , and a book on the Gulag, Histoire du Goulag with Marc Elie, at Editions la Découverte. She has also published several articles in French and English on the national question, and on Soviet lawyers and the relationship between the Procuracy and the Party. At the Jordan Center she will present her new book, Society of Thieves, Property and Socialism under Stalin, published last year at les éditions de l’EHESS. She is currently at work on penal justice and terror under Stalin, notably around the question of the politization and punishment of economic crimes. And she has just begun a project on the Cold war in Rhodesia-Nyasaland through Soviet eyes.

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.