Ideas and Practices of Combating Crime among Children and Adolescents in the USSR in the 1950s.

This research is aimed to study the problem of juvenile crime and methods of dealing with it in the second half of 1950s. The aim of this research is to analyze the process of USSR legislation’s humanization on the basis of norms and practices which were applied to juvenile criminals. Several tasks were set to reach the goal of the study: 1) to reconstruct the social profile and motivation of a young offender; 2) to analyze a set of the Komsomol’s documents which contain information about the reaction of Komsomol to the changes of the attitude to the crimes committed by the minors; 3) to study the approaches to the crime prevention of different state and public organizations. Komsomol’s documents are the key basis of the research as this organization was responsible for the juvenile crime prevention in the 1950s. The transfer from repressive to educational and preventative policy is investigated on the basis of record keeping and regulatory sources of the Komsomol and the official periodicals of the Komsomol and the Attorney General. As a result of the research the role of Komsomol organizations in the humanization process was defined and the system of state and public organizations’ interaction in the juvenile crime prevention was determined.