Comrades’ courts in the USSR and European countries of “people’s democracy”
Authors:   Kemerovo State University, Gavrilova Anzhelika V. 
Published: December 2024

Comrades’ courts were a special form of public justice during the Soviet period of Russian statehood, which was adopted by almost all European countries of “people’s democracy” at the turn of the 1960s. The aim of the present research is to form a scientific understanding of the phenomenon of comradely justice, characteristic of socialist legal systems. The stated scientific problem involves understanding the essence of the system of comrades’ courts, the internal periodization of its development at the stage of Soviet statehood, and understanding the mechanism of its perception by European states of “people’s democracy”. The conducted research is based on normative legal acts that define comradely justice. These include constitutions, civil procedural and criminal procedural codes, criminal codes, regulations and laws on comradely and public courts. The study uses a corpus of scientific publications by domestic and foreign authors that have not received proper understanding in Russian historical and legal science. The logical and functional methods were used as general scientific methods in the study, where the former made it possible to highlight the analogy and identity of comradely justice, and the latter promoted the study of the functions of comradely courts. The applied special scientific methods (historical and axiological) determined the understanding of the essence of comrades’ courts as a specific form of justice in people’s democracies. Comparative legal and formal legal techniques became the reference special research methods, which made it possible to compare comrades’ courts in various people’s democracies. In the course of the research, a comprehensive understanding of the essence of comrades’ courts, the specific forms of their organization, and the peculiarities of their functioning in the USSR and the countries of “people’s democracy” was developed. Comrades’ courts are quasi-judicial agency of public and state power, organically integrated into the concept of a socialist nation-wide state. Despite the general similarity of goals, objectives, and jurisdiction of comrades’ courts, officially, at the legislative level, in most cases they were not included in the judicial system that administered justice. The exceptions were the local people’s courts of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the public courts (conflict commissions) of the German Democratic Republic, which, in accordance with the constitutional legislation of these states, were part of the judicial system and administered justice within the framework of the tasks assigned to them by law. The phenomenon of Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the German Democratic Republic gives us every reason to use the term “public justice”. The comrades’ courts that operated in the Hungarian People’s Republic can also be considered as part of the judicial system. However, both the Soviet comrades’ courts and the Polish public court also cannot be considered in isolation from the judicial system: they de-facto carried out public justice delegated by the state.