Brian LaPierre: Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia. Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw. Ed. by Brian Lapierre. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. XIII, 281 S., 9 Tab. ISBN: 978-0-299-28744-3

Brian LaPierre: Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia. Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw. Ed. by Brian Lapierre. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. XIII, 281 S., 9 Tab. ISBN: 978-0-299-28744-3.

The ‘hooligan’ is one of the well-known stereotypical figures of Soviet society and at the same time one of the fuzziest terms in both judicial and everyday language, encompassing various ‘crimes’ from violent assault to cursing and spitting. During the Khrushchev years, usually considered as a period of liberalization and relative détente, the ambiguity of the concept as well as the convictions for hooliganism reached an unexpected peak. And while the Soviet leadership preferred to see (and propagate) the khuligan as an outsider to society who threatened the central values of the system and society, Brian LaPierre describes the hooligan as a “Soviet everyman”. In this view, the hooligan became someone that people lived with and met on the street every day – simply put: everyone could become a hooligan.

While acknowledging former studies of hooliganism that explain this phenomenon by social disorganization and/or a moral panic, or even view it as a form of opposition to the regime, LaPierre sets out to complete this image by looking more closely at the construction of the label ‘hooligan’, the political motives behind it as well as the underlying social developments. He situates the anti-hooliganism campaign of the late 1950s in the context of Khrushchev’s attempt to ‘socially engineer’ the new Soviet man, which aimed at implementing certain behaviour codes. According to LaPierre, this explains why the concept of khuligan became more ambiguous under Khrushchev – it enabled judges, prosecutors and policemen to define and sanction wrong behaviour pretty freely. Thus, the regime “produced” deviance by punishing people for forms of behaviour that had not been deemed deviant before. Here, the author challenges the interpretation of the hooligan as a covert oppositionist.

In his first chapter, LaPierre looks at the label of hooliganism and what people understood by it, at the reasons for the increase in convictions, at the official depiction of a stereotypical khuligan, and at who the average hooligan was. Chapters two and three focus on two categories of hooliganism that played a crucial role in the Khrushchev era: domestic hooliganism and petty hooliganism. The term domestic hooliganism evokes a slow expansion of what a hooligan could be from a stranger on the street who would randomly harass passers-by to the ‘apartment hooligan’, terrorizing his neighbours or battering his family. The category of domestic hooliganism is also to be considered in the context of Khrushchev’s housing project – it served as a tool to regulate people’s lives inside their new separate apartments.

The campaign against petty hooliganism was in some ways a contradictory one: it decriminalized less serious forms of hooliganism whilst simultaneously criminalizing forms of behaviour that had not been labelled deviant before. The meaning of ‘hooliganism’ was thus further extended to include more ‘ordinary’ forms of behaviour such as swearing, drunkenness or noisy conduct in public. While this social-engineering campaign was designed to build a sober and well-behaved socialist society, it did not lead to a decrease of deviance – but instead to its production. People who had never broken the law before tended to regularly end up in jail for short periods of time. The abuse of these petty hooliganism charges by denouncers and law enforcement agents, as well as the flood of cases overstraining police stations and courtrooms did not encourage the success of the campaign.

In chapters four and five, LaPierre investigates how hooliganism was policed during the Khrushchev era. At first, he looks at obshchestvennost’, public activism embodied by non-state institutions such as the Comrades’ Courts and druzhiny. Leaving aside the manifold interpretations of this campaign (by Berman or Kharkhordin), he points to one fact that scholars have allegedly neglected until now: the violence that the campaign entailed. According to LaPierre, violence (perpetrated by druzhinniki on duty) should not be regarded as collateral damage, but as an integral part of this outsourcing of police power. Petty hooliganism is presented here as a “textbook case” of the failure of these public institutions – basically due to a lack of support and control by state and Party.

Chapter five is dedicated to the changes in the political atmosphere under Khrushchev, as exemplified here by the so-called ‘soft line’ on petty crime and its demise. This ‘soft line’ denotes an approach that developed in the late 1950s and called for the re-education of petty criminals, attempting to keep them out of the prison system and to “reform” them in their labour collectives. Already in 1960, however, officials called for a harsher treatment of criminals and hate speech in newspapers and letters and statements from citizens became common. These two tendencies coexisted in the following years, leading to something that LaPierre calls a ‘confused socialism’, where the slow waning of the soft approach can be seen in the context of the many roll-backs in Khrushchev’s time.

While extensively examining hooliganism under Khrushchev, LaPierre touches a number of other topics, such as processes of political change in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Using the example of policing hooliganism, he describes the interplay of central instructions, regional interpretation and agency, as well as petitioning “from below” – which as such is not a new story. Additionally and more or less in passing, he reconsiders two of the most debated questions about everyday life in the Khrushchev era: First, the public/private divide and the discussion about the intrusion into the private realm; and secondly, the subject of public activism, or obshchestvennost’.

What had already been a label used to politicize non-political crimes in the Stalin era became an even more widely used tool under Khrushchev: By stigmatizing ordinary troublemakers as hooligans, the authorities depicted them as something extrinsic to society, which can be seen as a continuity of Stalinist practice. While the elements of social engineering and civilizing society were more important in the Khrushchev era than during the Stalin years, the policing of hooliganism had been a discursive means of excluding from society people labelled as ‘hooligan’ even from the 1930s onwards. This label allowed the Soviet leadership to define the kind of behaviour that they did not encourage as well as denying their responsibility for the social problems causing deviance. This “evasive” dimension could have been emphasized more clearly in LaPierre’s study.

Furthermore, when discussing conviction numbers, LaPierre looks at all the Soviet republics, but usually only discusses the Russian case. It would be interesting to examine the other republics and think about why numbers might differ in other parts of the Soviet empire. Finally, the reader tends to get lost at some points, as the links between the chapters are sometimes rather loose. The interesting thoughts about crime statistics and the ‘underreporting of crime’ are only introduced in the last part of the book, making the reader wonder why these questions are not addressed in the first four chapters.

Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia is a well-written study which situates the hooligan in his discursive, social and political background, a book that teaches us much about the tensions between liberalization and repression in the Khrushchev era.

Mirjam Galley, Sheffield, England