Article 58

Enactment and Amendment

Article 58 belongs to the 1926-edition RSFSR Penal Code. The code was adopted by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on 22 November 1926 and entered into force on 1 January 1927, while the state-crimes provisions were to enter into force with the union statute approved by the USSR Central Executive Committee on 25 February 1927. A decree of the RSFSR VTsIK and Sovnarkom of 6 June 1927 then replaced them with the new-redaction Articles 58-1 to 58-14, giving that redaction retroactive force to the date of the 25 February statute, so Articles 58-15 to 58-18 never actually operated. Sub-article 58-14 (counter-revolutionary sabotage) was added on 6 June 1927 and 58-6 was amended in 1928.

A decree of the RSFSR VTsIK and Sovnarkom of 20 July 1934 supplemented the code with Articles 58-1a to 58-1g, covering treason by military personnel and the family responsibility that followed. Some English-language accounts date these additions to 8 June 1934, so the discrepancy remains in the literature. The 1926-edition code remained in force, with many amendments, until the RSFSR Criminal Code of 27 October 1960 entered into force on 1 January 1961; it also applied in the Kazakh, Kirghiz and Karelo-Finnish SSRs and in the Baltic republics annexed in 1940.

Structure and Application

Sub-article 58-1 defined counter-revolutionary action as any action aimed at overthrowing or weakening the power of workers' and peasants' Soviets and of the USSR and Soviet and autonomous republic governments, or at undermining external security and the economic, political and national gains of the proletarian revolution. Article 58-7 covered the undermining of state industry, transport, monetary circulation or the credit system with a counter-revolutionary purpose, while 58-14 punished the conscious non-execution or deliberately careless execution of duties with the aim of weakening government power and the state apparatus. These were separate offences, though both were used against alleged economic obstruction.

Article 58-10 penalised anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation with at least six months' punishment, with 58-2 penalties applying in unrest or war. Article 58-12 penalised non-reporting of a known counter-revolutionary crime with at least six months, and it allowed onlookers to be prosecuted for not reporting instances of Article 58-10.

In the 1930s the NKVD's extrajudicial bodies, the Special Conference and the troikas, widely used so-called lettered articles, abbreviations corresponding to one or more points of Article 58. КРА and АСА (counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet agitation) corresponded to Art. 58-10, and КРО (counter-revolutionary organisation) to Art. 58-11.

Historical Role

Within the Soviet penal system the counter-revolutionary provisions of the 1926-edition code were the central legal form of political repression. During the Great Terror the NKVD's mass operations used Article 58 as their legal form. Order 00447 of 30 July 1937, approved by the Politburo on 31 July, divided former kulaks, criminals, clergy and other 'anti-Soviet elements' into a first category (execution) and a second category (imprisonment or deportation); from August 1937 to November 1938 about 1.7 million people were arrested, 390,000 shot and 380,000 sent to Gulag camps. Sentences were passed not by courts but by republican, krai and oblast NKVD troikas, an extrajudicial procedure. Among those executed under Article 58 in the terror were senior Red Army commanders such as Iona Yakir and Vasily Blyukher.

Article 58 was also applied to Soviet citizens outside the USSR. In the Soviet occupation zone of Germany people were interned as 'spies' on the basis of Article 58, and in the NKVD special camp at Bautzen about 66 percent of inmates fell into this category.

Those sentenced under Article 58 were classified as political prisoners called 'kaer', from 'counter-revolutionary', distinct from ordinary criminals ('ugolovnik'), and after release they could not settle closer than 100 km to large cities. In camp slang they were called 'контра'.

Figures compiled by the USSR MVD state that between 1921 and 1953, 3,777,380 people were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes and 642,980 were sentenced to the highest measure. These are Soviet-era administrative figures and should be attributed as such.

Distinctions and Successors

Analogous articles carried different numbers in other union republics. Article 54 of the Ukrainian SSR code and Article 63 of the Belorussian SSR code covered the same ground, while the Ukrainian code also applied in the Moldavian SSR.

The new republican codes in force from 1961 replaced the 'state crimes' chapter with Articles 64 to 88, divided into 'especially dangerous state crimes' and 'other state crimes'. Under the 1960 RSFSR code, successor Article 70 punished anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda with six months to seven years plus two to five years' exile, while offenders previously convicted of especially dangerous state crimes or acting in wartime faced three to ten years with or without exile. The offence was renamed by decree of the Presidium of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet of 11 September 1989 to 'calls for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order'.

Assessment and Debate

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, written between 1958 and 1968, characterised Article 58 as an all-encompassing provision that could punish any act. The book was first published in Russian in Paris by YMCA-Press in 1973, was widely published in the USSR only in 1989, and he was exiled six weeks after publication. This is a literary characterisation, and academic critics including Getty, Rittersporn and Wheatcroft questioned the book's methodology and quantitative estimates. Under Stalin the wording of Article 58-10 was read extremely broadly, so that criticism of the authorities, including a negative mention of a high official, could count as counter-revolutionary agitation.