On sciences and laws in occupied Estonia

This collection of articles includes research papers connected to numerous spheres of life in the era of Soviet occupation. The articles are related to several branches of research starting from legal history and sociology, extending to educational policy, psychiatry, and the history of medicine. Ukrainian historian Olesja Stasjuk studies how Ukrainian resistance fighters continued resisting in prison camps after Stalin’s period of rule. Eli Pilve examines the forced sovietisation of school education after the occupation of Estonia starting from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941 and resistance to it by students, parents, and teachers. The theme of Liisa Lail’s paper is the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes and the marginalisation or segregation of political dissidents from society using the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia. Peeter Kaasik examines Soviet sociology in general and the development of sociological research in the Estonian SSR in the 1960s to the 1980s. The theme of the sizeable article by Aivar Niglas is the terminology used in the legislation of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union to denote various types of banishment as punishment as well as the substance of banishment as punishment and its relationship to other types of punishment.