Law of Spikelets (Russian: Закон о колосках, Zakon o koloskakh) was a common name of the law based on the decree of Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom of the USSR "About protection of the property of state enterprises, kolkhozes and cooperatives, and strengthening of the public (socialist) property" (Об охране имущества государственных предприятий, колхозов и кооперативов и укреплении общественной (социалистической) собственности) dated August 7, 1932.
The common name came into use because peasants (including children) caught gleaning (hand-collecting the leftovers of grains or 'spikelets') in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for "damaging the state grain production".
The law was also known as the "Seven Eighths" Law (Закон 'семь восьмых', Zakon “sem’ Vos’mykh”“), because the date in Russian is written as 7/8/1932.[1]
- Section I covers theft at railroad and water communications.
- Section II covers theft of kolkhoz and cooperative property.
- Section III of the law covers violence, threats and intimidation of kolkhozniks. The punishment was 5 to 10 years of concentration camp time.
The primary punishment for theft according to this law was death by shooting. Under extenuating circumstances the punishment was at least 10 years of imprisonment. In all cases convicts' personal property was to be confiscated. It has been estimated that a quarter of a million people were charged by the OGPU and there were more than 200,000 sentences (normally of 5 – 10 years in the Gulag) of which more than 11,000 seem to have been death sentences.[2] Professor Ellman elaborates on why so few were sentenced to death:
Stalin had originally proposed that ‘as a rule’ the sentence under this decree would be the death penalty. The fact that only a tiny minority of those sentenced were shot probably resulted from a general unwillingness by judicial and security personnel to implement as originally intended what was widely seen as an impractical and barbaric decree (Khlevnyuk 1992, pp. 22 24; Solomon 1996, pp. 116 117). As Davies and Wheatcroft correctly observe (2004, p. 167): ‘The decree of 7 August was not only savage but impracticably savage’. This unwillingness is an interesting example of passive resistance by bureaucrats preventing Stalin from killing as many people as he would have liked to kill.[2]
Convicts for crimes covered by this law were not subject to amnesty.
The law was signed by Mikhail Kalinin, Vyacheslav Molotov (Skryabin), and Avel Enukidze.
See also
References
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Russian Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- ^ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
- ^ a b Michael Ellman, Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33 Revisited Europe-Asia Studies, Routledge. Vol. 59, No. 4, June 2007, 663-693. PDF file
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