Criminal cases of Soviet special services as a primary source for the history of everyday life: methodological accents

Abstract

In the article, the tandem of authors attempts to analyze the criminal cases of the Soviet special services as a primary source on the history of everyday life. The authors seek to identify methodological tools for studying this type of primary sources. It is stated that the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2014–2025 “raised to the surface” a number of important socio-cultural issues, since the Russian Federation is the direct successor of the Soviet Union and its actions appear as a kind of reflection of the national policy of its predecessor. It is argued that the concept of “criminal case” from the point of view of jurisprudence (in the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine) is used as a synonym for the category of “materials of criminal proceedings”. The term “criminal case” is used mostly in educational and scientific literature. The authors note that the materials of a criminal case perform an evidentiary and law enforcement function.
At the same time, in their opinion, this issue is tangential to another – anthropocentric, because it is capable of reproducing a historical person who does not claim to be “famous” or “outstanding” according to established academic characteristics. The biographies of these people, in the opinion of the authors of the article, are capable of reproducing historians who study the everyday life of past generations, that is, “everyday historians”. It is they who, within the framework of their methodological tools, study the life of “small” people in conditions of “borderline situations” – that is, wars, revolutions, occupations, persecutions, etc. The methodological principles of the history of everyday life as a separate scientific direction of historical science, in the opinion of the authors of the article, have significantly diversified the search tools, introducing a new search method – “do not loose any grain” which means “do not loose any single detail”. This method involves a more careful and holistic approach to the study of a historical person as such, studying down to the smallest details of his life. At the same time, according to the authors, criminal cases as primary sources have their advantages over other historical monuments - they are able to «snatch from the lives» of historical people facts that are mostly not noticed in traditional primary sources, perceived mainly as secondary.