The Line Court of the Yenisei (East Siberian) basin in the late 1940s - early 1950s
Authors:   South Siberian Branch of the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Tuguzhekova Valentina N. ,   N.F. Katanov Khakass State University, Pecherskiy Vladimir A. ,   Khakass Research Institute for Language, Literature, and History
Published: February 2023

The aim of this article is to study the activities of the Line Court of the Yenisei and then the East Siberian Basin in the period from the transformation of transport tribunals into line courts until the death of Joseph Stalin. Hence, the lower limit of the chronological framework of the article is determined by the year 1948, when transport justice authorities were demilitarized, and the upper limit by the end of the first quarter of 1953. The source base for the study was documents from collections of the State Archive of Krasnoyarsk Oblast and published research papers. Employees of water transport and related enterprises were under the jurisdiction of the Line Court. In the third quarter of 1948, 101 cases were received in the Line Court of the Yenisei Basin, 61 of them were initiated by the Decree of June 26, 1940. Line courts of water basins had to consider cases typical for water transport and cases typical for courts of general jurisdiction. This is shown by the judicial practice of the Line Court of the Yenisei Basin in the first and second quarters of 1949. The Line Court considered cases of theft of goods, which were initiated under the Decrees of June 4, 1947, On Criminal Liability for Theft of State and Public Property and On Strengthening the Protection of Citizens' Personal Property. From April 1, 1949, to April 1, 1950, the Line Court received 123 cases, including 9 cases of theft of personal property. From April 1, 1949, to April 1, 1950, the Line Court received 11 cases about accidents with 13 people, and 5 cases about other violations of discipline in transport for 6 people. All these crimes fell under Article 59-3 “b” of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (violation of labor discipline by transport workers (violation of traffic rules, substandard repairs, etc.). The Line Court rarely had to consider cases of “counter-revolutionary” crimes. From April 1, 1949, to April 1, 1950, the Line Court received 8 cases initiated under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. On the merits, 5 cases were considered, 5 people were convicted on them. Based on this research, the authors came to the conclusion that the peculiarity of linear courts was that these instances considered both cases that were in the jurisdiction of people's courts, and those of regional courts and courts of autonomous republics. Therefore, it was necessary to send cassation appeals on cases of the first category directly to the Supreme Court of the USSR, whereas sentences handed down by people's courts could undergo a long way through the county or regional court, the Supreme Court of the Union Republic and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. This practice violated the rights of transport workers, since the possibility of reviewing the sentence was difficult for them.