Mikhail Gernet

Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet (1874-1953) was a Russian and Soviet criminologist and legal historian, one of the founding figures of criminological thought in Russia. He taught law at Moscow State University from 1897 onward, where he championed progressive penal reform and worked to establish sociological criminology as a distinct field of study in Russia. An opponent of capital punishment, he developed theories connecting class structure to legal and criminal phenomena, work he continued after the Russian Revolution while contributing to Soviet legal scholarship through the 1930s. His writing helped introduce the concept of prisoner resocialization into Russian criminal law thought.