Countries of the former USSR

This chapter explores how the suspended prison sentences regime developed in the criminal legislation of the former USSR and, more broadly, the countries of the former Russian Empire in the 19th–20th centuries. The matter of the suspended prison sentence was seriously addressed for the first time in the late 1890s, but after 1917, the development of criminal legislation on the territory of the former Russian Empire followed two main lines encompassing countries that formed the USSR and all other independent parts of the former Empire (Finland, Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states). The chapter explores in detail the criminal legislation and case law in the first group of states in the early (1917–1958) and late Soviet periods (1958–1991) and gives a brief review of legislation in the second group.