The Criminal Law Foundations of the Fight against Professional Crime in Soviet Russia in the 1917-1920s

The article examines the issues of the development of domestic criminal legislation in the early years of the establishment of Soviet power to combat one of the most dangerous threats to public security of the country – professional crime. In the course of a comparative legal study of the most important normative legal acts regulating criminal law relations, the main means of bringing professional criminals to criminal responsibility have been identified. It is determined that in the Soviet criminal legislation there was a «special» article for «professionals», which toughens the punishment for committing a crime not just by a criminal, but by real professional criminals. However, within the framework of the established legal system and the practice of bringing to justice for the systematic nature of criminal activity that developed back in the pre-revolutionary period, this innovation did not «catch on». The concept of «professional criminal» was removed from the law, and the repetition of criminal activity began to be determined by the legislator using other concepts familiar to domestic criminal legislation, such as recidivism, fishing, repetition, systematic, etc. However, these institutions of criminal law did not fully allow the detection of professional crime among other types of crime, as a result of which legal measures to counter this type of crime in practice demonstrated insufficient effectiveness of implementation.