Soviet criminology was significantly influenced by the works of Stalinist prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky who introduced a number of measures into the penal code and investigatory practice that were unusual in other legal systems. Law was to be perceived not as means of determining individual guilt but dialectically and as part of broader class struggle. Based on that premise, people could be convicted even with absence of actual crime but if they merely belonged to a vaguely defined bourgeois class or if their conviction would be broadly beneficial for the revolutionary movement.