The Context of Complaint in Soviet Society

The form of restoration of justice adopted by a society is deeply connected to patterns of social relations and social inequality, to its political system, and to features of the economy. Moreover, the form of restoration of justice not only depends on that context and reflects its features, but in a certain sense reproduces it and contributes to its assertion. To understand the meaning, role, and function of a complaint in Russian society, it is necessary to comment on all these statements.

Despite the fact that the reputation of the law as a regulatory system of society suffered greatly under the influence of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the judiciary was not abolished entirely in any of the socialist countries. Already in the first years of Soviet power, a Soviet court system was established, and legislation was codified. The quality of the laws and the courts is arguable, but it is important that throughout the Soviet period, citizens had the opportunity to appeal to the courts, and judicial statistics show that they did.

On a number of issues, citizens could equally appeal to the court or to the authorities with their complaints. Certain types of civil cases (family law, labor law, housing law disputes, and non-claim cases) constituted about 70%

of all civil cases in the early 1960s (Van der Berg 1985:158). The same set of issues—labor disputes, problems of housing and utility services, consumer problems—are also brightly presented among the array of complaints addressed to the authorities.

Research data show that in authoritarian systems complaint mechanisms are more popular than the courts. For example, available Chinese statistics suggest that citizen use of complaining practices and xinfang bureaus far exceeds that of formal legal channels. According to the director of the national xinfang bureau, the number of applications totaled 8,640,040 during just the first nine months of 2002, corresponding with an annual rate of 11.5 million per year (Minzner 2006:105). By comparison, the entire Chinese judiciary handles six million legal cases annually. Хinfang channels rarely yield results for individual petitioners.

According to a recent Chinese study, less than 0.2% of petitioners surveyed succeeded in having their complaints addressed (ibid.:106). Nevertheless, the mechanism is far more popular than legal institutions.

Inga Markovits, who had the unique opportunity to compare practices of dispute resolution in Eastern and Western Germany, also argues that in similar cases citizens of Western Germany applied to the courts much more frequently. “Despite a widely distributed, easily accessible system of lay tribunals, despite low court costs, uncrowded dockets, easily available legal advice, and official encouragement to make use of socialist courts, East German citizens do so only quite rarely” (Markovits 1986:744). Citizens had knowledge of the law, but did not apply to the courts. “It may be that some of them use their new knowledge to give added weight to informal petitions and complaints” (ibid.:745).

Markovits explains this phenomenon by three reasons. The first one is the dependence of every citizen on collectivity, personal relations, and inclusion in informal networks (Ledeneva 1998):

The comparison suggests what socialist citizens seem to perceive themselves: That the socialist legal system does not treat them as isolated autonomous human beings, but (as in a family setting) as members of a collective, in need of support and guidance. The complaint, with its mixture of informality, collectivity, criticism, and concern seems best

to reflect the legal philosophy of a state which refuses to accept the opposition of personal and societal interests and upon which the citizen knows himself to be dependent (Markovits 1986:743).

People sue when they are socially unconnected with their opponent, when relationships are disrupted beyond repair, or when—as in the case of divorce—a suit is needed to server a legal tie which in real life has already withered (Markovits 1986:746; Blankenburg, Schönholz and Rogowski 1979; Blankenburg 1980:33; Galanter 1983). People who want to remain in continuous relationships, and for whom the relationships themselves are more valuable than compensation for individual grievances—e.g. business partners or colleagues—will not use the courts to settle their differences.

People are more likely to sue, furthermore, if their claims involve money or are easily translatable into money. Socialist citizens cannot easily distance themselves from their state or their fellow citizen. Instead, many ties hold citizens and society together. One of these ties is ideology. More important, however, than ideological bounds are factual ties between people.

Kathryn Hendley comes to a similar conclusion about unwillingness of the Soviet people to solve conflicts in courts. Investigating relations between neighbors in multiapartment houses, she found out that Soviet people make efforts to avoid serious litigations, no matter how difficult the conflict is. Solving problems inside of the community of neighbors or neglecting problems allow to save personal relations much better (Hendley 2017:69–70).

The second reason is connected with the lack of private property and relatively low significance of money in socialist society:

Hence the widespread use of barter in socialist societies: In the GDR, housing, which cannot freely be bought, is increasingly exchanged through contracts to swap apartments, for instance. In the Soviet Union, suggestions have been made to award litigation victories in kind, in addition to rubles…. Without the social disconnection between prospective plaintiffs and defendants and without the universal utility of money, law seems to lose its usefulness as a means of resolving conflicts and coordinating interests (Markovits 1986:750).

The distinction between rights and needs has little meaning in socialist administrative reality. In civil law, many consumer rights are not asserted through litigation (that is, as rights) but through complaints to local government bodies (that is, as needs), submitted without any means of pressuring authorities on whose fairness and generosity the complainant will have to rely (Ross and Littlefield 1978). A very large number of complaints deal with problems that in a capitalist legal system would be handled by the market: excessive waiting times for laundry service, a shortage of taxicabs, no oranges in the stores (Markovits 1986:737). For the average consumer, the planning and distribution system created unfavorable conditions. The amount of goods produced in the country was insufficient to meet the needs of all Soviet citizens. The planning and distribution system regularly failed, as a result of which even those goods that were produced in large quantities were unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas (Bogdanova 2015).

Simultaneously, citizens and consumers had no regular channels for the market system feedback to express discontent and protect their rights.

The third reason is the nature of socialist law and the model of governance itself. “The main moral support for socialist law does not come from its users and addressees, who, on the contrary, neglect and evade it, but from its proponent, the state… Socialist law is very much the law of the socialist state, not of its citizens” (Markovits 1986:760). It serves public institutions, and when all institutions are public, a citizen challenging their actions has a very slim chance of winning.

Soviet citizens really had little reason to address private issues to the courts. The complaint mechanism was much more relevant to the ideological doctrine, to the arrangement of society, power, economy, and social relations.

While access to the courts was cheap, access to the complaint mechanism was free. Internal navigation of the applications made the mechanism convenient to use. The applicants did not need to know either rules of jurisdictions, nor legislation. In the late Soviet period the mechanism of complaint had outgrown dangerous repressive risks. Besides, complaining allowed one to preserve valuable informal relationships in comparison with litigation. The Soviet man had no need to protect his property, and a lawsuit in a state court against a state institution was fraught with so many risks that it was not

worth the trouble. In the conditions of the Soviet system there was no point in demanding. It was more profitable to solicit.