Between the Biological and the Social: Victor Brailovsky and Early Soviet Criminal Biology

Abstract

This article examines the work of Soviet psychiatrist Viktor Vladimirovich Brailovsky (1893–1942) in the field of biological study of crime. In 1925, he founded in Rostov-on-Don the Office for the Study of the Personality of Offenders, which investigated the relationship between biological constitution and antisocial behaviour. Placing Brailovsky’s work within the international scientific context of the first third of the 20th century, the article demonstrates that his approach was shaped by both Soviet biomedicine and international practice, particularly Austrian-German criminal biology and Belgian penitentiary anthropology. Brailovsky implemented the criminological laboratory model that became widespread in various countries after the First World War. Drawing on the reflexological approach of V. I. Bekhterev, which in the 1920s was positioned as Marxist, Brailovsky combined the analysis of the social and biological causes of crime. At the same time, in his research, he adhered to a viewpoint unacceptable to Marxism: that biological predisposition, embedded in the human constitution, can play a decisive role in the genesis of criminal behaviour. This emphasis on the biological factor led to criticism of Brailovsky in the late 1920s, during Stalin’s Great Break and the Cultural Revolution, which ultimately led to the cessation of biological research in Soviet criminology.