Crime in the Soviet Union

Crime in the Soviet Union was separated into "ordinary crime" and "political crime." Soviet authorities did not release crime data.

Crime statistics were a state secret in the USSR from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. In the following decades, the Soviet government only released partial information about crime in the USSR. It was only in the 1960s that the Soviet government began to classify and record crime in a systematic manner, but still prevented professional Soviet criminologists from accessing the full data. Perestroika eased some of the access to the crime data.

It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union that crime data became more widely available. Reconstructions of Soviet crime data after the collapse of the USSR indicate that incarceration rates during Stalin's rule were "extremely high" and that the criminal justice system operated on a presumption of guilt, high rates of capital punishment, criminalization of workplace violations, and the high prevalence of "political crimes."

Corruption was common; in particular, in the form of bribery, primarily due to the paucity of goods and services on the open market.