Significantly about the Insignificant: Practice of Applying Part 2 of Article 14 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation

this publication continues the research of the paired category “significant – insignificant” in criminal law, covered in the previous issue of the journal. It is carried out through the prism of requirements imposed by society on criminal proceedings. Purpose: to more deeply study some theoretical aspects of the problem, to get closer to understanding the essence of some aspects of judicial discretion, and to analyze reviews of the latest judicial practice. Methods: historical, comparative legal, dialectical cognition, analysis and synthesis. Results: the criminal law doctrine of insignificance is studied in detail. Four relatively independent periods of its evolution (prerevolutionary (1845–1917), post-revolutionary (1917–1958), developed socialism (1958–1991) and post-soviet (since 1991)) are identified. The institution of “small size” (1965–1982) is criticized. The author analyses situations when courts at the precedent level, “torpedoing” the severity of the crimes indicated by the legislator, seek options to release certain persons both from criminal liability and criminal punishment. The author comes to the following conclusions: there is no single interpretation of the concepts of significant and insignificant in the theory of Russian criminal law; since algorithms for the application of Part 2 of Article 14 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, as well as similar criminal legal regulations (for example, Part 6 of Article 15 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) are still developing, in which a dispute inevitably arises about the significance of what has been done, society has to rely on the level of interpretation art of a particular judge. A growing number of lawyers propose to bring the problem of the insignificance of an act to the discussion of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. In subsequent articles, the reader will be offered a substantive analysis of the practice of applying Part 2 of Article 14 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation contained in the decisions of the First General Jurisdiction Court of Cassation.