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Abstract: In 2017, Russia decriminalized the crime of simple battery (poboi), which was historically a main avenue for prosecuting cases of gender-based violence in the country. This change was made despite the fact that domestic violence crimes have multiplied in Russia over the past 20 years. The decriminalization was met with an outcry from public activists and victim advocates, who argued that such a change would increase gender-based violence. The proponents of reform suggested that criminalization would simplify the process and make justice more accessible to victims. Drawing on two sets of in-depth interviews with Russian criminal justice professionals (police officers, defense lawyers, and justices of the peace), this study suggests that the decriminalization was driven in part by the inability of the Russian criminal justice system to effectively "process" the crime of poboi. The paper argues that the changes of 2017 were implemented to make the crime of domestic violence more controllable and amenable to the needs of the justice system, specifically the police.
Public policy on gender-based violence (GBV) is intrinsically linked to a state's political regime.1 These relationships are not always straightforward and are complicated by each country's unique cultural profile (Sanford, Stefatos, and Salvi 2016). In general, however, those countries with mature democratic political structures tend to have more effective public policies on GBV than those with autocratic regimes.
In the post-Soviet space, the paradigm of transitioning to democracy has frequently been used to explain the political changes that have occurred since the fall of the Soviet Union (Johnson 2007). Accordingly, the challenges of establishing an effective public policy against domestic violence-and, indeed, the failure to do so-have been explained through the lenses of imperfect transition to democratic government and immature civil society (Alekseeva 2004; Horne 1999; Jappinen and Johnson 2016; Johnson 2017).
Over the last 15 years, however, many political scientists have shifted away from the idea of democratic transition and begun to describe several post-Soviet countries, including Russia, as stable hybrid regimes characterized by a combination of strong authoritarian elements and weak, superficial democratic elements (Carothers 2002). It has been noted that a hybrid regime is a popular mode of political organization in the modern world, one that many countries adopt as a convenient way to hide authoritarianism...