Sexual Freedom and Protection of Women: Challenges of Codification in Early Soviet Criminal Law

The article examines the process of early Soviet criminal codification of the section on sexual offenses, in the creation of which Bolshevik jurists sought to establish equality between men and women. The study consistently demonstrates the stages of the development of the 1922 Code, starting with the first decrees and ending with the 1926 edition of the Criminal Code. A detailed analysis of this process proves that the creation of the Code was not unilinear – the legislators did not initially seek to establish the concept of sexual freedoms and the gender neutrality of the articles. This criminal canon was born only in the process of repeated discussions at different levels – from democratically organized legal congresses to sessions of the SNK. The study also argues that despite all the progressive aspirations of the legislators, the Code retained a paternalistic approach to the protection of women, treating them as a special category in need of state care. The authors of the draft continued to present rape as a turning point in a woman's fate and included a separate article in the code that criminalized the coercion of solely women into sexual intercourse by persons on whom they depended financially or in service. At the same time, the protection of women was still motivated by ideas of sexual freedom rather than the traditional religious or marriage norms characteristic of pre-revolutionary criminal law. Because of their novelty, these norms in the area of sexual offenses were insufficiently developed in terms of legal technique, but they contributed to a change in evidentiary procedures and certainly increased access to justice for a wide range of people, regardless of their gender or marital status.