Annotation

The article is devoted to the consideration of the activities of the Supreme Court of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. Many facts and conclusions of the author are presented on the basis of archival materials. The article analyzes the structure and powers of the Supreme Court of the USSR in the pre-war period. A conclusion is made about the super-centralization of the powers of the Supreme Court of the USSR in relation to the courts of the Union republics. The actual activities of the Supreme Court of the USSR were built as a supervisory court, which led to a massive supervisory review, primarily of criminal cases, with the right to withdraw any case from any court. With the outbreak of World War II, the Supreme Court of the USSR continued to exercise supervisory powers, the structure of the USSR Armed Forces did not undergo drastic changes, but there was a significant redistribution of the internal load. The article details the activities of the Military Collegium of the USSR Armed Forces during the war years. It is concluded about an ambiguous legal and historical assessment of the activities of the Military Collegium during the war period. On the one hand, the Military Collegium acted as an instrument of punitive policy, acting under the strict control of party and administrative bodies, but on the other hand, the analysis of statistics and specific practice allows us to talk about the systemic corrective and humanizing policy pursued by the Military Collegium of the USSR Armed Forces.