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Yana Skorobogatov, "Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
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Casual Speaker 1
Have you seen any dinosaurs?
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Casual Speaker 2
What kind of question is that?
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Casual Speaker 1
On August 14, I think that our neighborhood has moved.
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Movie Trailer Narrator
We're in the past. Summer ends on Oak street. Run from producer J.J. abrams, Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor. We're gonna survive the end of Oak Street. Directed by David Robert Mitchell. Rated PG 13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. August the 14th.
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Welcome to the
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Alisa Kuzmina
hello, dear listeners. I'm Alisa Kuzmina, a new Books Network host. Today My guest is Dr. Yana Skorobagatov. We will be discussing her new book titled Fate in My the Death Penalty in the Soviet Union. Welcome to the podcast, Yana, and congratulations on having the book finally out. How does it feel?
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Thank you so much for having me, Alisa. It's so nice to be on. It feels great to have the book out. I feel like I've been working on this for, yeah, more than a decade. And it is the best feeling to have a hard copy of one's book in their hands.
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Alisa Kuzmina
And to our listeners, I want to say that it looks amazing. It has a very beautiful cover. Fate in my hands. It really stands out to me, this phrase when I see the book. And I wanted to ask you about this title and about this phrase specifically. What is the significance of this words in relation to the death penalty and to the book's argument?
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Thank you so much for that question. I had the privilege of, of having lunch with a editor of an academic press that I did not end up publishing with. But the editor told me we were just kind of discussing book titles that she thinks are evocative and compelling for readers. And she told me, she gave me this idea. She's like, I, you know, some of my favorite book titles are ones or where it's, it's a phrase that comes from or like a term or an expression or a quote from a character in the book. She gave me this idea of perhaps using not my own words, but the words of the historical subjects that I study as the book title. And I was shocked that I didn't think of doing this myself because as readers will learn, the book is really based on many, many, many, many letters written by individuals, people on death row in the Soviet Union, their family members, their loved ones, and also the family members and loved ones of the victims of people on death row. And so I had, I had this treasure trove of material that I could basically like, choose from as I wanted to, from really, kind of really poetic quotes and writings from these people. And I really quickly kind of remembered one of the people who readers will encounter in the introduction of the book, providing it in a letter that he wrote from death row from. To a. An appeals court that he was writing to, asking for his case looked over and for his life to be saved, for his death sentence to be overturned. And in it, he wrote that he was reflecting on his life and kind of offering the reader an overview of the story of his life as he understood it in that moment, as he wanted to present it to the appellate court in that moment. And at one point he writes, all my life I believed that fate was in my hands, that he in some ways had control over his life. He was writing in 1974, and he was in his early 20s. And so essentially the moment, the years of the post Stalin period that he lived through, he felt like he had a control, control over his destiny, over the course that his life would take. And I was really taken by this quote, because in so many ways, this is one of the major arguments of my book as it relates to the nature of the post Stalinist justice system, of post Stalinist criminal justice. And one of the things I track in the book is how the post Stalinist justice system and the reforms that Khrushchev and his successors undertook in order to reform the way that criminal justice was structured and how it operated after Stalin's death was to give people a sense of always imperfect, but a sense that they had control over how their case would go through the courts and how justice would be meted in their. In their instances. So, for example, something like a robust appellate procedure that this person who delivered this quote that my book title is based on, this is something that really didn't exist in the same capacity in the Stalin period. This is one of the big reforms that the. That Stalin's successors undertook in order to kind of give that sense of not so much control, but this kind of ideas of due process, transparency, a sense that justice in the Soviet Union was more objective, more substantial than it was during the Stalin period. And so it was a poetic remark that I use slightly out of context, but I really do think that it speaks to one of the book's major arguments about the kind of the legitimacy in so many ways of post Stalinist justice, even in procedure, in a process like the death penalty process.
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Alisa Kuzmina
No, 100%. And you know, I told you previously that as I was reading your book, I thought about some echoes to studying Soviet American couples. And one of those is perhaps a coincidental or not dates when the death penalty was no more. And when it was introduced again because that corresponds directly almost when the marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners were prohibited, same year that the death penalty was revoked, and then the death penalty was reintroduced again. Could you tell us what was that process of like, revoking and then reintroducing the death penalty process in the Soviet Union?
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Yes. So I'll go back a little bit to even the. In order to really sort of make that very unusual, unexpected moment in Stalinist jurisprudence make sense. What you're referring to is the abolition of the death penalty for all crimes under Stalin in 1947. In the spring of 1947, a law is passed called the Historic act that abolishes the death penalty for all crimes during peace time in the Soviet Union. So under Stalin, you have this unexpected total kind of renunciation and rejection of the state's ability and right to kill its own citizens. This is very counterintuitive. And this is actually one of the facts that I learned about when I was. Even before I embarked on. Really decided on this as my first book project to. This is a fact that really surprised me. It's useful to take that story a little back to the early Soviet period to really understand why that became even a possibility under Stalin. So something that many listeners would find surprising is that the Bolsheviks, and, you know, Lenin and Stalin in particular, were actually very critical of the imperial Russian regimes and the czar's use of the death penalty. In the late imperial period, especially in the first decades of the 20th century, when the Imperial Russian government used the death penalty largely to suppress political dissent from revolutionaries, but also workers who were going on strike, non Russian ethnic minorities in the country who were clamoring for independence. So it was used as this weapon against the masses. And this is how Lenin, when he did write, he didn't write a ton on the death penalty and his criticisms of the death penalty, but when Lenin did write about his disdain for the regime's use of the death penalty, this is how he framed it. This is a weapon of a minority against an oppressed majority authority. And he envisioned, you know, communist future, a world where there would be no need for the death penalty, not only because the state would cease to exist, but also crime would cease to exist. And there would be no need to, you know, have something like the death penalty to regulate crime, to prevent disorder. So the Bolsheviks, when they come to power in October, November 1917, the day after they come to power, they abolish the death penalty. So that's one of the first of legal. Legal decrees passed is this total abolition? Of course, this does not last. The death penalty comes back, is reinstated during the Civil War in October 1918, and it stays on the books after the war. The civil war ends. The Bolsheviks deem the death penalties to be much more of a necessity to maintain the safety of the revolution from various political enemies and those who they deemed to be threats to the revolution. But there was always this hope that. And this is actually written in, very interestingly, in the early, earliest Soviet criminal code that specified that the death penalty would be on the books. It would be allowed to be used against people who were found guilty of committing crimes against the state, but until its ultimate abolition. So even in the text of the criminal justice codes, there is this kind of hope, kind of inscribed in it, that there would be a time when there would be no use for this death penalty to exist, that there would be no need for it. We will abolish it. We being the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state. Enter Stalin. No need for me to summarize here how he uses the state's ability and right to kill to suppress all forms of political dissent, extrajudicial ways that even violated the language of the criminal, the first criminal Code. But then after the war, after the construction of socialism, after the Five Year Plans, the. After the Second World War, Stalin and those within his inner circle victorious, really see this M.O. as a moment in 1947, this becomes the moment to finally make good on this early promise of ruling without the death penalty. You know, all enemies from within and without have been vanquished. This is how they frame this moment on the pages of the front pages of Pravda that they. Where they announced the passage of this, what they called the historic act, the abolishing the death penalty. They see this as the right moment finally to end, to get rid of this weapon of. Against oppressed masses that they so hated. But then the Cold War begins. Stalin takes this very kind of conservative turn towards the end of his life, and various events and forces conspire to kind of lead to the chipping away of that decree that abolished death penalty. And the death penalty returns for espionage, for treason, is kind of along a Cold War key. And then ultimately, as I talk about, it's reinstated fully, but in 1954, but under Khrushchev for aggravated intentional homicide.
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Alisa Kuzmina
Thank you. That is fascinating. And I think it makes a lot of sense that we stepped back into the Bolshevik rise to power. And I wonder if we can kind of jump forward now a little bit, because as you were talking about the title, you know, I immediately thought about Alexei Yurchak's Everything was forever until it was no more. You know, the agency perhaps of the Soviet citizens, which you explore so wonderfully in your book and even your book structure outlined in the table of contents shows that because it begins with forgiveness and concludes with its. And which I thought was a clever way to highlight the agency of Soviet citizens in relation to the state and not vice versa. Was this shift in Soviet citizens attitude towards states forgiveness something you had expected to see when you set out to do the archival research, or did it emerge in the process of reviewing all the documents?
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
This was not something that I thought I would be encountering this, this idea of and kind of changing the evolution of the possibility of forgiveness in the post Stalinist Soviet yin was absolutely not something that I set out to explore. I'm, I'll be honest and say that I really, when I began my research, I just wanted to see what a death penalty case looked like in the post Stalinist period. You read so much about Stalin, the Stalinist, I mean, and just not even that, but just you read about the Moscow trials, you read about the experiences of people awaiting their executions during the purges. You know, this is mostly high ranking Bolshevik members like Bukharin and so forth. I mean these were always such fascinating documents and we know so much about them. But I didn't know anything about what it was like to be on death row in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. I just, it was a very much like a sources first endeavor. And I just really wanted to see again, what did people say? What did the courtroom look like, if there even was like a real courtroom, what did a trial look like? What were the stages of going from just a, you know, arrest to the ultimate execution? I didn't know. What did it look similar to what, what I know about how it looks like in the United States and in Western Europe. Does it look very different? So I really was kind of, it started out by really wanting to learn about the, the logistics of it and the, the infrastructure of this legal process. But then as you mentioned, I became very interested in the things that people said when they were on, on death row, when they were in the courtroom, when they were being interrogated, even at their arrest. I was really surprised to see just how much space there was for people to, to speak to the state, to speak maybe not just to the state, but to, for themselves, to kind of write about their own lives through these various appeals letters that people wrote to commute their sentences, their death sentences. There the voices were, were Everywhere these documents were saturated with various things that people said. And one, over time, as I process these documents and I work with documents that span almost 40 years and there are a hundred. And in the book, the ones that ultimately made to the book, there are 101 case files. But within those, each case file, there could be, you know, one or two appeals letters, but then just tons and tons and tons of transcripts. I think my largest one was 14 volumes. Largest case file was 14 volumes. And you. Each volume has like 200k, 200 pages. It was just like a mountain of, of. Of reading and analyzing. And ultimately what I discovered was that there was this really, really profound shift. If you look at a letter from the earlier period that I look at, I, That I focus on, so I'm a letter asking for Mercy from 1956. I saw that it was very, it looked, it looked in very differently than a letter that was written in 1986. There's so many differences. And I. The. The chapters of the book are kind of speak to various themes and ideas that motifs that emerge in these letters in these different times. But one of the biggest overarching ideas that I found was that as the Soviet project matured in the post Stalin period, people no longer seemed to, as time went by, to really believe that there was somebody that was meaning a state that was capable of or interested in forgiving them, offering the kind of forgiveness that seemed much less elusive in the early post Stalin period. There seemed to be a very. This kind of shift in how people spoke to the state, but also how the state listened to them. There seemed to. In the earlier period, I saw that there was a really much more kind of cohesive and easily decipherable kind of grammar that people spoke in and that the state listened. Listened to. This deteriorates as I show through various chapters in the books. As we get into the late Soviet period, by the, by the 80s, by the collapse of the Soviet Union, as I argue, the state is speaking in a very different way than the people and vice versa.
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Alisa Kuzmina
I was wondering if we could maybe zoom in a little bit on the content and the format of those appeals to forgiveness. Could you give maybe a few examples of the content difference? Right. And then maybe we could talk about the format, because that was also fascinating.
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Yeah. So something that was very. That appeared very commonly or kind of motifs and references that appeared really frequently. Opening a letter from the 1950s, throughout the 60s, you can almost be guaranteed that you would see somebody on death row using their biographies very proudly, perhaps unsurprisingly. Full of achievements, full of these kind of heroic acts, like speaking about their amazing labor output in various kind of labor work that they did before their arrest, before they were sentenced to death, citing their own or their family's wartime service in, during Second World War as an example, as examples of their heroism, their dedication to the Soviet project, and by extension their rights to. As what they saw as their right to continue to be a member of society and not be expelled from it by way of execution. These were very common references. These references almost certainly, save for some very particular ways of discussing the Second World War, almost entirely disappear from people, from the way that people asked for forgiveness. And by asking for forgiveness, I mean writing letters for mercy, for their death sentences to be commuted as one approaches the decade, the last decades of the Soviet project. People from death row writing in the late 70s, the 80s, certainly the late 80s and the two years 1990, 1991 of the 1990s, do not have that kind of bright autobiographical content to reference in order to showcase their superiority, their heroism. In fact, the narrative that one gets, it's not that of a hero narrative. It's that of a traumatized person, somebody who was victimized, who was traumatized by things outside of their control. So people start to talk about their very difficult childhoods, childhoods that were sometimes made difficult by the loss of a relative in the Second World War. But this, this loss is not framed in these letters as a glorious sacrifice that their relative parent made for the Soviet Union. It was made, it was a loss that resulted in tragedy for themselves, for their families. People spoke about abuse in the hands of correctional officers, of the prison environments that maybe that they lived in. They were recidivists who had a previous, previous criminal record. They would blame the, the correctional facility that they had once spent time in as a source of harm for them. Whereas in the 50s and the 60s, many people would cite the, the Gulag or the. A correctional or a prison setting as a place of growth, as a place where they were kind of brought back on the, the straight path and they can do it again. If their sentence was commit, was commuted and, and they could be kind of corrected again by the glorious Soviet system. But they would also start talking about law. During the late 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, they would, instead of really even drawing on their autobiography, on their biographies, on their life stories, they would accuse the state of wrongdoing based on its abuse of violation of various procedural norms and rules as stipulated in the country's procedural codes, that they witnessed taking place while their trial was being adjudicated. So also, the language really does shift. The shift I really identify as taking place in the late 1970s.
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Alisa Kuzmina
Before we talk about the format, I think many of our listeners would want to know about the gendered aspects of the cases that you've studied.
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Something that I did not expect, again, because I just didn't know anything about this. The death penalty in the Soviet Union after Stalin was the extent to which, within these murder cases, most of which were in the ones I looked at, committed by men, most of the victims were women. They were often romantic partners, so wives, girlfriends, often just some. In some cases, just women who were kind of randomly killed on the street. Some young children were included. I did not expect to really engage with the. With gender and the history of Soviet women and gender relations in the Soviet Union when embarking on this. But this. The dynamic that you meant that you mentioned, Anisa, is really became clear was that these were cases almost you know, really dramatically majority of them were cases of female victims. So men killing women and girls.
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Alisa Kuzmina
Okay. I can't help but ask you about the chapter where you examined it in detail. And that chapter left a very strong impression because of the subject matter. It's called Domestic Crime, Public Punishment. Could we discuss it a bit in more detail? How did this chapter emerge? I think you started kind of talking about noticing the shift already, but also, how did you approach writing about these women and as the reader will find out, about the communities who really stood up for them, how did you decide what to include and what to omit?
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Yeah, thank you so much for that question. This was the hardest chapter, you know, the hard chapter for me to write, both because the subject matter is very disturbing and I do have appropriate warnings or I disclose for the reader some advanced information about what to expect from the chapter early on, so listeners know that that's there. It was difficult because, again, the grisly, in some cases, very grisly material. But also it asked me or, you know, required me to engage in journalistic ethics that I was trained in and was not myself really aware of or felt that I necessarily needed to adhere to. And so I had to really, in order to deal with things like confidentiality, especially because many of these files are that I use. I was kind of given this special permission to view them. And so I had access to really personal information. And so I felt that I just had to even, you know, be even more really, really careful because some people's relatives are probably still alive. And I just had to be Very careful. The, the chapter, as you summarized a bit, Alisa, is about again, men who committed murder against women, and specifically the women, the friends, the. The female friends, coworkers, neighbors, members of the deceased, the murdered, the slain women's community who, the leftovers of this violent act, they. And how they in so many ways take to and really embrace the death penalty process and the possibility of the perpetrator of these gruesome murders, the men who killed their friends, they really, these women really kind of turn to the legal system and the punitive potential of the legal system in this moment to basically seek revenge for the slain women in their lives against these men. And the Soviet state is kind of surprisingly very open to these women's participation, to getting the women again, women who were friends, neighbors, relatives, members of their. Of the slain woman's community to. They really. The state was very interested in getting them very intimately involved in the investigation of the. The case against the male perpetrator, testifying in court of writing their own letters to the court demanding the kind of the justice that they believed needed in order to, in this case. And so often that justice was the death penalty in the high form of punishment available by the Soviet state. And so, and they did this in creative ways. So in, along with women, not only spoke out in court, gave testimony, you know, really sharing some very personal details about what they knew their, their female friend, relative, coworker went through in the violence that these women that the slain woman had suffered in the hands of their. Their husband, this or their boyfriend or this, this man, some case, the father in their. In their lives that ultimately like, killed them. But they did so through creative means. For example, they would give photographs, they would share photographs that they had of themselves with the slain woman to provide both evidence to give a sense of what this woman looked like in her life before she was a corpse. As pictured in the crime scene photos and the autopsy photos that were part of the criminal case file. They, you know, walked investigators through the workplace to see how, you know, if she was a. A very, very productive laborer. They'll show her the very. The investigator, the various awards that hung in the workplace halls celebrating her contributions to the workplace. So these were. I found these to be strategies for engagement, for defending and kind of finding agency in the system that really did, you know, was. Was saturated with male and female violence in a society that was where that was not so much tolerated openly, but it was just, you know, male and female female violence in the Soviet Union was accepted as just something that was A part of life. And I found that telling these stories, even if it did involve perhaps sharing sensitive personal information, when done delicately, by anonymizing names, by not showing, you know, all of the most grizzlies photographs and not providing the most kind of really sensitive testimonies, I was able to tell a story that I think these women actually wanted to be told openly because they were doing so in very open ways that, you know, resemble what, you know, Giselle Pellico did in France most recently by kind of speaking openly about something that was just intended to be quieted, silenced with the shame concentrated, cocooned within the victim. And now these women were trying to reverse that by, in my opinion, by kind of moving that shame, transferring it to, to the, to the perpetrator, and do so you had to kind of speak publicly about it. And, and this is what they did.
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Alisa Kuzmina
And I think you mentioned the concept of affective knowledge that also might relate here very well. And actually, for me as a reader, the existence of this visual material, some of which you included on the pages, I think that is partially for sure what made that chapter so, you know, like, visceral and like, affecting to me, in addition, of course, to the subject matter. And you mention having to think about journalism and journalism ethics. And also in the pages of that chapter, you talk about the origins of forensic photography. And with the very vast array of material that you have assembled, and as the readers will know, you talk about psychiatry. I was wondering if you could think of some other things that you had to research, a skill that you had to acquire in order to be able to write that book.
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Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Yes, well, I had to. I had to learn a lot about the death penalty as it is practiced in the. In the United States. So I, and I actually had a, you know, probably the most prolific journalist on death penalty, on like the death penalty in the United States, Maurice Shama, who actually has like a really great podcast right now with the New York Times and Serial called the last 12 weeks. He consulted on the. On my book and helped me kind of really, in his own work, really have helped me learn, like, I had a little crash course on death penalty jurisprudence in the United States in order to see, so I could know what is distinct and what is not distinct about the Soviet case compared to kind of a paradigmatic Western death penalty regime. So the United States, I have a chapter where I examine how people on death row and how just ordinary Soviet citizens who were drawn into various death penalty cases used psychiatric knowledge or kind of used the what, you know, in The States, they call them the insanity defense, quote, unquote. How they used that in order to make a case for why they're. They should not be sent ultimately executed. The. In the Soviet Union, it was not permissible. Those who were found to be mentally ill, deemed to be mentally ill at or before the commission of a crime, could not be sentenced to death. And actually they could not be kind of fully found to be fully guilty of the crime that they committed. So this was a very attractive strategy for people on death row to utilize in order to potentially have their sentences commuted. And it wasn't just death row inmates who would do this. Family and friends who would. Who would write in defense of somebody on death row to get them off of death row, can use the language of psychiatry and kind of cite examples where they believed that perhaps their loved one suffered from mental illness. And here too, there would be very kind of very pertinent divulgences of very personal details, instances of suicide attempts, some very gruesome acts of violence, animal abuse that these people committed in their past, that these loved ones viewed as potential signs of mental illness. Of course, mental illness in the Soviet Union looked very different than in the West. There was just completely different understanding of what counted as mental illness in the Soviet Union than in the United States. So I had to really kind of learn about the distinctions between, you know, the DSM in the United States and various kind of categories of what counted as insanity, which for the most part only really be diagnosed as insane if they experienced forms of psychosis or schizophrenia. If they departed, kind of they experienced like a rupture from reality. This is so often how this. How insanity was described or in the. So in the Soviet Union, this is very different than understandings of insanity certainly today and in the late United States and the west in the late 20th century. So having to understand the distinctions between the different traditions of mental health diagnoses was indeed another line of research that I did not anticipate going on before when I started out this project. But it was. It really enriched the text.
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Casual Speaker 1
Have you seen any dinosaurs?
- [32:15]
Casual Speaker 2
What kind of question is that?
- [32:18]
Casual Speaker 1
On August 14, I think that our neighborhood has moved.
- [32:24]
Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
We're in the past.
- [32:26]
Movie Trailer Narrator
Summer Ends on Oak street run from producer JJ Abrams Anne Hathaway Ewan McGregor we're gonna survive the end of Oak Street Directed by David Robert Mitchell. Rated PG13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. August the 14th of.
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- [33:14]
Alisa Kuzmina
yes, I agree. And the chapter two, the science of Guilt and Innocence really presents the scope of that research. And thank you for doing that because it definitely made the chapter very enriching to read and very evocative of many questions, including one of comparison. I was going to return to the format of fate in my hands of the letter for forgiveness. And you mention in the book that sometimes those letters would span pages and pages and pages. And then in chapter six you also mention a poem that from what I understand was part of this appeal. Can you tell us about these different formats that this letters existed in?
- [33:59]
Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Yeah, I mean I was so impressed and again surprised certainly by how some of these letters looked like most of these letters that I encountered were the original copies. So these were not. Some of them were depending on the archive where the letter came from. Most of the letters were the original handwritten. So what the person we're just talking about letters written by death row inmates. You know what the person held in their hands like the writing instrument, the, the piece of paper that they held in their hands when they were given that these tools, these instruments to in their prison cells to engage in what I call life and death writing in order to essentially save their lives. So it so fascinated by the diversity of how they wrote. So I was interested in just even like how they had different colored pens in times like some were purple, some were black. But some paper was just kind of like our, you know, what we would see as think of as computer paper, not like online. Some was loose leaf. The poem that you. Some, some letters took the, took the form of a, a poem. Some of them were. Majority of them were kind of like a recitation of their life stories. Some were these, I mean I, some of them were like. I think my largest one was in the 400 pages long handwritten which actually the defense attorney for the person who wrote that 400 plus page appeal letter. And this is handwritten double sided. So gosh, how long does that take you to write, that take this person to write. The. The sheer length of that letter was used by that death row inmates defense attorney as an example of the fact that he was mentally insane because he was like. And again, this is just, you know, in so many ways very crude description of a person. But this person is. Suffers from schizophrenia because what quote unquote, normal person would spend, would write a 400 page letter of appeal. Like, just like, you know, and in some ways it just, it does defy logic that somebody would dedicate so much time, so many pages and that also that the Soviet state and prison, you know, the prison guards and the people who'd hand over this paper would just keep giving this guy all this paper to write. And so there's. All this is very surprising. The poem that you're referring to was written by a man, a 19 year old man in the 70s, I believe it was like 1976 who wrote this poem. And it's just like this, in so many ways, just like this very innocent poem that addressed to his. His love interest, a girl he called named Alona that he had a crush on. And it spoke of an unrequited love. And he's basically saying goodbye to her because he believes that the system was rigged against him. He admit admits to the offense in question. In this case he was sentenced to death for getting in a brawl and killing a what he described as a member at the Compsomol. So he was saying how, you know, he. The court took the side of this Komsomol member who was seen as this model Soviet citizen who was killed by this non Komsomol member, this, the person writing this poem. And he just felt like the system was rigged against him. And now he. This was his final and that he was fated to die. And he ultimately does die, he's ultimately executed. But he's writing this letter to his love interests, you know, saying goodbye. And actually something that's one the listener and a reader will not see is that it was actually also like the print above the letter, it says the Russian for request for pardon. He like illustrates the words themselves, request for pardon in the letter also like very. Again, very artistically. And so there's a lot of artistic flourishes, like creativity packed within these. Otherwise, like this is a bureaucratic instrument, a letter of appeal. But yet these people invested so much time, energy, creativity into making them what they wanted and what they believed made sense for them in that moment.
- [38:08]
Alisa Kuzmina
What was interesting about this letter too, to me is him writing to his Father. And the father responds, tell me what's bothering you, honey. Fathers, you know, are here to help. Which was an interesting example of almost this like male camaraderie, but also warmth. Because so many of the examples that we see in your book involve women in some ways either as defense attorneys. There were also women, like mothers, appealing to defend their sons who were sentenced or partners. And this example incorporated a father as a called to help. So that seemed very interesting.
- [38:54]
Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Yes, mothers play a large role in this book. They appear often they appear as, as you mentioned, people who. The person. I'm a very reliable defender of the person in death on death row. At the same time, they also appear as vocal supporters and advocates for victims, especially for children and or grandchildren who were killed, you know, either male or female. So. So women are really kind of come out as the defenders of like a moral order in the Soviet, in the post Stalinist period. And this remains the case. This is an unchanging dynamic throughout the decades that I. Men, you're right that men do not. Fathers and husbands do not necessarily occupy a very prominent role in the book. What's interesting is when they do appear, they often appear as figures to be feared or sources of disappointment. So for example, one letter writer that I examine, he talks about, and this is in a later chapter when it was very common for death row inmates in their letters to talk about how they have no relationship to the quote, unquote, Great Patriotic war, World War II. This very reliable reference that letter writers in the 50s and the 60s could, could make in order to prove their self worth and kind of to make a case for why their lives should be saved. Letter writers in the 70s and the 80s and very, very early 90s really didn't have a very intimate connection to the war. And they couldn't even really, they did not really feel like it was readily possible or easy to reference even their own father's achievements in the war. Sometimes the father also didn't fight in the war. So for example, one letter writer talked about his own, in some ways, like disappointment that he did not have something like the Great Patriotic War quote, unquote, to, you know, test his character to. To serve as like a shiny example of his achievements as a Soviet citizen. In fact, what he said was his father's own service in the war was so, you know, valiant and so, you know, outstanding that it just kind of made it impossible for his son, the letter writer, to really live up to that legacy, to that expectation. And so he just almost didn't really try and he instead, you know, as he himself describes in that letter, embarked on a life of criminality, dropped out of school, you know, this kind of hope that one could never live up to that kind of, that generation of, of Soviet men. This becomes a very recurring motif in letters and a reality. And this is not just, you know, honestly, it's an. I mean, this, just a Soviet example, this, I know, for example, existed in the post Civil War period in the United States where kind of the Civil War became and, you know, decades after its end became this like unachievably great accomplishment. That new generation of men in the early, the turn of the 20th century, for example, kind of turned to and were like, we want our own war. And people argue that, that, you know, a reason why the United States got involved in the Spanish American War and you know, to pursue this kind of like to, to have something that does a great masculinity, this like new masculine militant culture that seemed elusive after the Civil War in the US I think something really similar happened in the Soviet Union after World War II.
- [42:29]
Alisa Kuzmina
Another personality which appears in the book is Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Can you tell us kind of maybe in relation to what you just said? But why, why is he in the, in the book?
- [42:44]
Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Yeah, so he does not come up in the letters themselves. People do not reference him explicitly in the letter, in their letters as, you know, somebody who they, you know, aspire to. I mean, in so many ways, like his achievements are so singular that it's not, he's not like. No one is trying to be like Yuri Gagardin in the same way that, you know, other. Other Soviet heroes like Shapaev and Zoya Kosmadenskoye are cited in the letters kind of as these like warriors that in some ways could be emulated if there was another war to be fought. Gagarin was not kind of mentioned in the letters, but I use him as an example and you know, obviously a real person who served as what I, what I argue. I mean, he was really the last Soviet kind of state created Soviet red Hero, that of the state's creation. I mean, again, he was a real person. His achievements were real, but he was really touted as the, this kind of a model Soviet citizen that so all Soviet citizens knew about. Obviously they knew who he was. They could claim to try to emulate him. They knew the values that he represented. He was like a family man. I mean, this is. Andrew Jenks has a wonderful biography of him, of Yuri Gagarin, where listeners can read more about his kind of the ways in which the Soviet state have celebrated him and kind of sold him to Soviet citizens, as in the Khrushchev era, as a model for this sort of like post Stalinist masculinity, but also just like everyday, like, he's the everyman. And so something that came up in the letters that I, that I, that I discovered is how as the years, as, as Soviet society and, you know, time moved away from the Stalin years, the kind of references, the kind of very crude references to like, I was a laborer. I overproduced the plan by 300% in my, in my factory, I, you know, I fought valiantly in the war and got this and this and this medal. Those references do start to disappear because, you know, this is just a generational change. People just don't have those. That proximity to a hyper militant labor regime, the war itself. And so Gagarians serve this very important purpose for the state of providing them with new kind of values for people to emulate and to reference and to kind of show that they know being a family man, being a good person, being, you know, somebody who sacrificed for the country and, you know, achieved things for the Soviet Union beyond that did not, you know, involve blood and violence. You see the letters, people talking about their. Again, this is mostly men talking about how they contributed to their families, you know, welfare in various ways. How they helped their wife when she was hurt her leg and helped walk her to the grocery store or took care of the kids while, while she was on medical arrest. How they, you know, were. Were family men. How they took care of the kids, how they love kids, how they, you know, they really kind of leaned into, had tried to become something like a judicagarian in the pages of their, of all things, of their death penalty appeal letters.
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- [46:40]
Alisa Kuzmina
NA for sure. And perhaps relevant for the chronological trajectory of your book and of your argument on page 138. You make a very Curious parallel about the connection between death row inmates and Soviet dissidents. Can you talk more about that?
- [47:01]
Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
I mean, this is something that again, did not expect to uncover, but something that is, you know, becomes an undeniable feature like omnipresent in letters written by death row inmates. Starting in the. Really during the second half of the 1970s was the emergence of what I refer to in the book as legal talk. A mention of in. In ways. A very, very specific mention of specific laws within the country's criminal code that were in the eyes of the people writing the appeals letter, misinterpreted of procedural norms which are outlined in the Soviet code of criminal procedure that were violated over the course of a death row inmates's case's trajectory. So, for example, they would cite how their defense attorney. They were not given the chance to talk to their defense attorney at certain stages of their cases, litigation. And this violated article of the code of criminal procedure. And this was just. This language did not exist in the 50s and the 60s. I. There's not a single example that I. Of the 101 cases that I use for the book that. That had that mention of this, you know, this highly legalistic argument for why one's life should be saved or why they're. They are maybe not innocent because many very few people actually argue that they. The crime they commit, that they were innocent of the crime they committed. Many actually did, you know, admit in their letters that they were guilty, but that they had, they were mitigating circumstances. What they're saying by kind of by citing these laws is that they're saying the state is guilty in some ways the state is not innocent. And so therefore the state lacks the moral authority to condemn them to death, to take. To strip them of their lives. This is a very similar tactic strategy that as Benjamin Nathan writes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, his history of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, this is a very similar strategy that the dissidents engaged in all really around the same time as these turn towards legal vocabulary that I see in the death in the death row inmate letters that I survey. This, you know, acute attention to law, acute knowledge of law. And Benjamin Ethans in his own book talks about how this is. A lot of this is due to the fact that. I mean, I even asked him like, what do you make of the fact that people on death row spoke of these laws and of these articles? And he told me, he's like. And I suspected this as well, but I didn't have pure, like real. I don't, I don't know what a death row library looks like or what books exactly people on death row had access to. But he mentioned how many dissidents spoke of in the prisons having access to copies of the Soviet criminal code and copies of the code of Criminal procedure. Precisely because and this goes back to something I mentioned earlier in our interview, because the Soviet state after Stalin was very invested in making, at the very least, making the Soviet criminal justice system look like it adhered to due process, that it was legal, it functioned according to law and not according to arbitrariness, that people did have, you know, access. Even those like people like death row inmates who tended to be not have a, you know, advanced degrees, who did not, who had really just kind of bare minimum, the legally required level of education even they would have access to legal knowledge through a lawyer, certainly. But even in a prison, they would have copies of these codes. So a lot of the dissidents that several dissidents in the book that Benjamin Nathans wrote talk about having access to these books, to these codes.
- [50:51]
Alisa Kuzmina
This is very interesting. Thank you so much for sharing this insights. No, it's really quite telling. So our interview will likely come out in August of 2026. With your book finally being recently out, I was wondering maybe, like, how do you plan to promote it? Do you plan to have talks about the books? Are there any aspects of it that you're most excited to talk about? And in contrast to that, maybe are there some questions that maybe you're not so much looking forward to? Anything that you could share would be highly appreciated by our listeners, I'm sure.
- [51:29]
Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
I'm looking forward to giving some talks. I have two talk in California at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, on October 15th, at Stanford University on October 16th. And then I have a talk at Wisconsin where Francine Hirsch is Soviet historian and she works on Soviet legal history on a much different scale on a different topic. But obviously she worked on Nuremberg, so it'll be exciting to be in conversation with her on that. I'll be giving a book talk at Book Culture near Columbia University, a couple blocks from my office, where I'm right now on September 30th at 7:00pm you know, I am still sort of in the midst of thinking about other speaking engagements, but something that I hope to do. Again, I mentioned this. I, you know, I really learned a lot about the American death penalty, and there's a lot of really incredible organizations that are working, that work with people on death row. The Innocence Project institutes that are really kind of studying the, you know, what is increasingly apparent as the illogic, obviously, the inhumanity of the death penalty in the United States. So aji, which is Bryan Stevenson's organization, I'm hoping to really kind of engage with that community, even though obviously that's such a different topic, an absolutely different kind of legal universe. But also, as I try to show in various moments throughout the book, where I do make, you know, where I try to, if I find it to be useful, to kind of bring up a comparison with the United States, which is what I think readers would be most familiar with, I do actually see a lot of similarities between both kind of the legal and procedural infrastructure of the Soviet death penalty vis a vis the American death penalty, but also the challenges that these two death penalty regimes face both, you know, in trying to find a, quote, unquote, humane way to kill, a humane way to prepare someone or kind of have somebody endure the process of waiting for their death. You know, how do you. Both of these regimes dealt with these questions? And some of their answers are very similar, others are very different. And so I would love to be able to speak among, you know, among the, with those, those people who are also interested in studying a more contemporary, perhaps American or capital punishment regime. A question that I don't. I'm not sure that I I've received this question before, or I've actually it's more a comment that I receive, and this has to do with something that I haven't talked about yet, but I mention it in the book, is, which is the fact that Russia today does not have a legal death penalty. In 1996, Russia issues a moratorium on the death penalty as a requirement, kind of a step that Russia needed to take. This is under Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin's presidency, to join the Council of Europe, which mandates the Council of Europe kind of mandates that any of its members, they need to. They can't, you can't have the death penalty. It's kind of seen as a, a violation of kind of a European definition or concept of human rights. And so Yeltsin issues a moratorium in 1996. And this moratorium has remained in place and ever since then, even to the present. And I think it matters that there is a moratorium. The fact that it's legal and coded does matter because it actually is something that many people within, for instance, the current President Vladimir Putin's circle are very critical of. They see this as like, you know, we have a right to have our own criminal justice law. Criminal laws. Why did we give this up just to join Europe? Many people sometimes, when I mention this, that Russia today does not have the death penalty or does not. There are no courts issuing death sentences that are then carried out. For example, people say a very common refrain. And I've found this many times, Russia finds other ways to kill its citizens. Like I said, I think it matters that on paper you can't kill your citizens. Because what. I don't even want to think about what would happen if that wasn't on paper, part of the reason why, and this is not the only reason, but the fact that in 1922, the first Soviet criminal code allowed the death penalty to was that made it legally permissible, made it that much. Even if it's a little. Even if, you know, Stalin would have killed many millions of people even without that law, it's still, it's an. It's an important. It was an important kind of stepping stone for that. It lent what he did some legal justification, actually a lot of legal justification. And so my. I'm still trying to work through that, that kind of comment, which I take seriously and I understand where it's coming from. But I do think that laws do matter and they do shape conduct. Even if the person who, even if a leader does ultimately kind of rule by, you know, according to their own, their own will in so many other ways, I think it does matter.
- [57:08]
Alisa Kuzmina
Well put. Thank you so much, Yana, for this interview today. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and for coming to New Books Network. It was a great pleasure to talk to you.
- [57:19]
Dr. Yana Skorobagatov
Thank you so much, Elisa, and to our listeners.
- [57:22]
Alisa Kuzmina
I hope you check out Yana's book and visit our website to discover more books and conversations.
- [57:27]
New Books Network Host
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