Evolution of the Criminal Legislation of the USSR in Relation to Labor Desertion during the Great Patriotic War

The article analyzes the development of criminal legislation in the field of combating unauthorized abandonment of a place of work (labor desertion) during the Great Patriotic War. This scientific problem seems relevant in modern historiography in the following context of the unfolding discussions: thanks to or contrary to the criminal punishment for desertion from factories labor resources in Soviet industry were ring-fenced; how effectively labor legislation, with the help of punitive measures, could reduce the severity of the problem of unauthorized abandonment by employees of their place of work? The purpose of the study is to analyze the evolution of legislation in the field of combating labor desertion. The objectives of the study are to identify and interpret the content of regulatory legal acts that testified to a change in the state policy in the studied area, to consider problems that arose in law enforcement practices, and to study the effectiveness of their solution in the context of the amended legislation. The study was carried out within the framework of the historical and genetic approach which made it possible to identify the stages in the development of legislation in this area, show the presence of causal relationships between the key events of the process, and explore the consequences. The result of the work is authorial periodization and interpretation of stages in the state policy to combat labor desertion throughout 1941-1945. The boundary of the new stage is the adoption of a normative legal act which significantly changed the methods of this struggle. If during 1941-1944 the state formally consistently tightens labor repressions (penalties for unauthorized abandonment of a job are toughened; the number of enterprises and industries covered by military decrees on labor desertion is increasing; new corpus delicti are distinguished), then at the final stage of the war, it is increasingly practicing amnesties for labor desertion. The author explains this evolution by the discrepancy between the high resource costs associated with finding labor deserters and the weak effectiveness of punitive policies on the labor front.