The New Law

Ever since Stalin's death and Nikita Khrushchev's sensational revelations of the tyrant's betrayals of "Socialist legality." Soviet citizens have been told that they will get formal safeguards under the law. All leading Soviet jurists now brand as "erroneous" the specious justifications by which the late Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin's top prosecutor, 1) upheld police terror, 2) used confessions alone to prove guilt, and 3) when no law applied, invoked other laws "by analogy" to send innumerable men to death or slavery in the theatrical purge trials of the '30s.

Last week, after years of wrangling among judges and party officials over how far the reforms should go, the revised body of Soviet criminal law was put before the Supreme Soviet and swiftly approved. Embodying for the most part changes that have already been adopted in fact, the new code puts the final seal on one of the major developments of Russia's post-Stalin period.

Due Process. Though it says nothing about habeas corpus, jury trial, or the presumption that a man is innocent until proved guilty (a concept denounced as "middleclass nonsense" during last week's debate), the new Soviet code lays down that the Soviet citizen may not be punished except for specified crimes and only after what is by Red lights, due process of law. Presumably, that bars the security police from carrying off people, as they carried off millions in Stalin's time," by their own "administrative processes."

The new code officially provides that every man may have a public trial, a defense lawyer, and a chance to appeal the verdict. It cuts prison sentences for "ordinary" crimes from 25 to 10 years, and to 15 years for exceptionally severe offenses. It raises the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 16. It scraps such punishments as exile abroad, recently proposed for Nobel Novelist Boris Pasternak. But capital punishment stays on the books, and repeaters or hardened criminals lose all rights to early parole. Death by shooting continues for treason (including "flight abroad or refusal to return to the U.S.S.R. from abroad").

On the ground that bourgeois and upper-class elements have now vanished from the Soviet scene, the code drops Stalin's old category of "enemy of the people." and the clause authorizing imprisonment or transportation of the relatives of such unfortunates. But the new laws still provide for punishment of any "counterrevolutionary" act, a term broad enough to run the population of Soviet "corrective labor" camps back from their present estimated 1,000,000 to the 10 million of 1953.

As the world learned when Stalin put forth his 1936 model constitution and followed it with the bloody purges of 1936-38, it is not Soviet theory but practice that counts. Stalin's successors have relaxed police surveillance, and the changes now put in black and white add up to a substantial strengthening of legal security for the individual in the Soviet Union. Yet the Communist Party remains the supreme arbiter in Soviet society.

Chain of Command. In another pertinent step, the Supreme Soviet last week ratified the appointment of Central Committee Personnel Chief Aleksander Nikolaevich Shelepin, 40, as the Soviet Union's top cop, succeeding the bloodstained General Ivan Serov (TIME, Dec. 22). A youthful political commissar in the 1939-40 Russo-Finnish war, Shelepin rose through the Young Communist organization and served as its secretary from 1952 until he joined Khrushchev's headquarters staff last year. Too young to have been active in the police terrorist years of Yezhov and Beria, Shelepin has not yet acquired the hateful public reputation that goes with the job. Two things stand out about his appointment: 1) he is a party bureaucrat, indicating the party's continuing dominance; 2) he is Khrushchev's man.

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