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This article studies the institutional and legal reconfiguration that followed a major crisis in the Soviet Union, the collectivization of the countryside in the early 1930s. It focuses in particular on the decree punishing theft of public property of August 1932, a public decree issued under Stalin’s direct orders and applied both by the ordinary courts, the people’s courts, and by the troiki, the emergency courts of the political police. This dualism—or dual state, normative and prerogative, to use Ernst Fraenkel’s formula—was reconfigured during this punitive campaign, which saw a succession of terror in the countryside, a softening of penalties through a return to the penal code, and amnesty operations. This chaotic evolution led to a change in legislation, with the protection of socialist property becoming a duty of Soviet citizens. The gradual dismantling of the special courts, the troiki, also marked a step forward, transferring so-called political cases to the ordinary courts. But this normalization was deceptive: special courts were organized within the People’s Courts, controlled by the political police.