Rafail Samuilovich Belkin is a well-known national forensic scientist, Honored Science Worker of the RSFSR, professor, major general of the police, honorary academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. He took part in the Great Patriotic War. He was considered one of the largest experts in the field of forensics in the country, was a theorist and practitioner of crime investigation and prevention.
early years
Rafail Samuilovich Belkin was born in 1922 in the city of Chernigov in the territory of modern Ukraine. In 1940 he joined the party, was soon drafted into the ranks of the Red Army. He began his service in the Far East.
After the start of World War II, he fought near Moscow, participated in battles near Smolensk, Rzhev, in battles on the Dnieper and on the Kursk Bulge. He liberated Warsaw, participated in the assault on Berlin. On Victory Day he ended up on the Elbe.
After the war, Rafail Samuilovich Belkin served in the occupation forces in Germany. In 1946 he was returned to Moscow, where he entered the law academy.
He graduated in 1951 with a gold medal. He began his official career as an investigator in the military prosecutor's office in the Baku district.
Forensic enthusiasm
Just at that time, an important event took place in the biography of Rafail Samuilovich Belkin, which predetermined his fate. He became interested in forensics. Even then, he began to collect materials for scientific work in parallel. In 1954 he defended his thesis on the inspection of the scene.
Since 1955, the hero of our article has been working at the Higher School of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, starting as a senior researcher. Gradually rose to the rank of professor of the Department of Forensics.
In 1961, Rafail Samuilovich Belkin defended his doctoral dissertation, exploring experimental methods in forensics and the Soviet criminal process. Some of the opponents criticized him for offering to go to the crime scene with a witness and the accused. But in general, everyone recognized that the defense was successful.
After that, Rafail Samuilovich Belkin taught forensics courses for students for more than 20 years, while remaining the head of the department. Great popularity began to enjoy his scientific works.
At the source
Photo by Rafail Samuilovich Belkin is well known to everyone who is in contact with this topic. After all, it is he who is considered the founder of his own scientific school, in which there were more than a hundred students. During his lifetime, he was given the unofficial title of patriarch of national forensics.
Under his leadership, more than 120 candidates and doctors of legal sciences successfully prepared and defended their dissertations.
Personal life
His followers are the children of the hero of our article. In 1949, his daughter Elena was born to him, in marriage she took the name Rossinskaya. She is an authoritative domestic forensic scientist specializing in the field of forensics. She is now 69 years old.
Her son Sergei Borisovich Rossinsky became a professor in the field of criminal procedure.
In 1955, the hero of our article gave birth to a son, Anatoly. He is now 63 years old. He is a lawyer, engaged in forensic science and criminal law. Also known as a poet and player in the sports version of the game "What? Where? When?".
Research Areas
Forensics for Rafail Samuilovich Belkin became the main business of his life. He conducted important research in the field of operational-search activities and criminal proceedings. In 1959 he wrote the famous monograph "Theory and Practice of the Investigative Experiment", actually predicting the emergence of a new investigative action, which was legalized in the criminal code only a year later. Belkin has already analyzed it from a forensic perspective.
In a 1964 monograph, “An Experiment in Investigative Judicial and Expert Practice,” he examined this topic from the perspective of a general theory of knowledge, focusing on questions of proof.
Two years later, his work came out, known as "Gathering, researching and evaluating evidence. Methods and nature." In it, he drew the obvious connection between criminal law and criminalistics, laying the foundations of the domestic methodology. Fundamental was his 1969 monograph, Forensics and Evidence.
Between 1977 and 1979, his famous three-volume work, Courses of Soviet Forensics, was published. In it, he continued to develop the doctrine of the taxonomy, methods and language of forensics, explored private forensic theories, mechanisms of crime, the causality of the search, forecasting.
It was he who managed to identify and describe the basic laws of the development of criminalistics. Of great importance was the idea put forward by him that criminalistics is inherently not only legal, but also synthetic science, which is most directly connected with most existing natural sciences. It was assumed that they should complement the structure of forensic science with a general theory of science.
Key Achievements
In his work, Rafail Belkin paid direct attention to the problems of forensic tactics, for example, existing combinations and techniques, the factor of surprise, investigative actions.
He deeply investigated the range of these issues, which were directly related to the solution of the ethical problems of criminal proceedings in general and forensics in particular.
Belkin regularly investigated and raised the question of how tolerable deception is as a means of mental influence. For example, he demonstrated that the then concept of immorality of deception was recognized only in words. In fact, almost all employees, without exception, resort to its use.
In this regard, Belkin called for official recognition that deception in the law enforcement system within a certain framework is permissible, since operational-search activity is, in principle, based on the deception of criminals and misinformation. All this was actually legalized by the state. At the same time, he proposed to limit the limits of this deception to strict limits.
Rafail Belkin died in Moscow in 2001. He was 78 years old. Most of his works are still relevant and in demand among modern investigators and forensic scientists.