Years ago Harold Berman observed that for many people in the west the term Soviet law represented a contradiction. Popular imagination found little place for law or criminal justice in a society where terror or extralegal coercion played a major role. Yet, as Berman argued, even in Stalin's Russia law and force existed side by side, and there was a “surprising degree of official compartmentalization of the legal and the extra-legal.” Berman recognized that the separation of law and terror was no accident; rather it was a product of the regime's commitment to law and the functions it could perform for a stable, conservative social order. Three decades later western Sovietologists are only starting to come to terms with the conservative phase of Stalin's rule; and, despite a fine essay by Robert Sharlet, the promotion of law has yet to be incorporated into the standard portrait of Stalinism. A major reason is the continuation of doubts about the possibilities for law where terror also reigns.

The establishment of constitutional review in transitional and nondemocratic regimes has drawn attention to courts in nondemocratic states. Typically, authoritarian leaders treat law and courts in an instrumental fashion and try to keep judges dependent and responsive to their desires. The three books under review reveal the sophisticated ways that this is achieved, including the development ofjudicial bureaucracies and the cultivation of apolitical judges, and how the empowerment ofjudges tends to produce power that is contingent and easily withdrawn. The leaders of established authoritarian regimes do empower judges, if only to gain legitimacy for the regime and keep its officials accountable, but sometimes at a cost to judicial independence. The mixture of independence, power, and accountability ofjudges in authoritarian states differs from what is found in democratic ones, and informal practices often determine the meaning of judicial power. These patterns have serious consequences for legal transition.

This article assesses the power of judges in Russia (on courts of general jurisdiction, arbitrazh courts, and military courts) in dealing with cases in which the government or one of its officials is a party. Power, that is, the resources of judges to make binding decisions, is understood as including jurisdiction, discretion, and authority to ensure compliance. The article analyzes the dramatic growth of jurisdiction and caseload in administrative justice in post-Soviet Russia to the year 2002 and examines how the courts have performed in handling the review of actions by officials (including in the military), tax cases, electoral disputes, and the legality of normative acts (both regulations and laws of lower governments), especially in the late 1990s. High rates of success for persons bringing suits against the government suggest that judges were able by and large to adjudicate fairly and rule against the state. To a considerable degree (but not always), those decisions were implemented (more often than were constitutional and commercial decisions). Interestingly, citizens who challenged the actions of officials in court had much more success than those who brought complaints to the Procuracy. Finally, the article develops an agenda for future research that would deepen understanding of the significance of administrative justice in the Russian Federation and the power of judges.

As communism was collapsing, both the discipline of political science and American foreign policy were becoming captivated by two concepts—the third wave of democratization and the democratic peace. The third wave of democratization is the "worldwide movement to democracy" that occurred in more than thirty countries during the decade and a half that began with the Portuguese coup of 1974. The democratic peace is the special peace that develops among liberal states "because they exercise democratic caution and are capable of appreciating the international rights of foreign republics."

In the early and mid-1920's Soviet courts were overwhelmed with new criminal business, prompting Bolshevik leaders to transfer most cases of petty crime away from the courts either to administrative proceedings or to lay bodies (comrades' courts and village social courts). This article examines the Bolshevik experiment in decriminalization and diversion—its causes, its politics, and its consequences both for the courts and for the alternatives to them. The crisis of congestion in early Soviet courts resulted neither from a growth in actual criminal behavior nor from prosecution of new crimes devised by the Bolsheviks. It owed its origin to the elimination after the Revolution of various extrajudicial mechanisms used by the Tsars for handling infractions, thereby producing a criminalization of traditional misdeeds. The subsequent adoption by Soviet leaders of a policy of decriminalization followed careful study, and despite the turbulent times bore the mark of rational decision making. And the policy was implemented; a large number of cases were shifted first to administrative processing by police officials and then to lay tribunals, especially to the village social courts, which proved more viable than the comrades' courts which were established in factories. But the waves of diversion did not relieve court congestion, as in each instance new sorts of cases replaced those moved away. The experience tended to confirm the thesis that the amount of crime prosecuted in a society is a function of the capacity of its criminal justice institutions.

To most Western observers Soviet penal policy means Stalin's labor camps, and what is known about the camps comes from the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In our admiration of Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of the camps, however, we ought not to accept on faith his version of Soviet penal history. Solzhenitsyn treats Soviet penal practice before 1929 simply as a stage in the development of the camps. He finds the roots of Stalin's camps in Lenin's Russia, and from those roots, he argues, the camps developed steadily and inevitably. To be sure, with hindsight one can plausibly regard the civil war camps as precedent for the later ones and the camps of Solovki during the 1920s as the embryo from which the Stalinist camps grew. But to look only at these developments is to take a selective or partial view of early Soviet penal history, for the civil war period contained the embryo of another penal policy, a progressive policy, which differed radically from that practiced by the Cheka and OGPU. And it was this progressive policy, not the Cheka's approach, which gained the predominant position during the NEP years.