The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The courts were of three kinds: the people’s courts, the circuit courts, and the Revolutionary Tribunals—the Revtribunals. The people’s courts handled ordinary misdemeanors and nonpolitical criminal cases. They were not empowered to impose death sentences, and, laughable as it seems, the people’s court could not, in fact, impose sentences exceeding two years.