Crime in the Soviet Union was separated into "ordinary crime" and "political crime."[1] Soviet authorities did not release crime data.[2]
Crime statistics were a state secret in the USSR from the late 1920s to the early 1930s.[1] In the following decades, the Soviet government only released partial information about crime in the USSR.[1] It was only in the 1960s that the Soviet government began to classify and record crime in a systematic manner, but still prevented professional Soviet criminologists from accessing the full data.[1] Perestroika eased some of the access to the crime data.[1]
It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union that crime data became more widely available.[2] Reconstructions of Soviet crime data after the collapse of the USSR indicate that incarceration rates during Stalin's rule were "extremely high" and that the criminal justice system operated on a presumption of guilt, high rates of capital punishment, criminalization of workplace violations, and the high prevalence of "political crimes."[3]
Corruption was common; in particular, in the form of bribery, primarily due to the paucity of goods and services on the open market.[4]