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The general paucity of data on Soviet social conditions (in comparison to the data available from many other developed countries, including some of those in Eastern Europe) renders the exploration of sociological issues relating to the USSR rather difficult. This problem of information is especially evident when one's attention is drawn to phenomena such as crime and delinquency. Despite the growing volume of Soviet writing on these problems, "hard" data are mainly notable for their absence, and the statistics Soviet writers publish are most frequently percentage distributions of unknown integers. While lack of such data presents a formidable obstacle to research, it has not entirely discouraged Western scholars from attempts to clarify one or another segment ofthe total picture of crime, alcoholism and allied forms of deviant behavior in the USSR.' The present study represents a tentative attempt at extending these inquiries in tvo ways: first, by focusing on criminal homicide, a particular type of deviant behavior with a defined quality that the categories "crime" and "delinquency" lack; and second, by placing the admittedly extremely sketchy Soviet data available into a loose comparative framework with parallel data from American studies of homicide.

If, in a nation where comprehensive statistics on social problems are rarely if ever published, legislative action and press attention to such problems may be taken as an indication of the seriousness with which they are regarded, then the Soviet Union's alcohol problem is serious indeed. On April 8, 1967, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved a decree, On Compulsory Treatment and Labor Re-education of Habitual Drunkards (Alcoholics). This decree, which went into effect on September 1 of the same year, provides for one to two-year terms in special “treatment-labor” medical institutions for excessive drinkers who violate “labor discipline, public order, and the rules of the socialist community.” The new institutions were subordinated not to the Ministry of Health but to the RSFSR Ministry for the Preservation of Public Order (MOOP, now renamed MVD). While it contained a number of significant departures from earlier legislation, the decree's most important point was its “preventive” emphasis. Previously an offending drunkard had to be on trial for a crime in a people's court before proceedings for compulsory treatment could be instituted.

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