This chapter analyses how social, economic, and political conditions across different historical periods have shaped people’s relationships with punishment and social order. Drawing on extensive empirical material consisting of 322 life histories, it applies the concept of ‘punishment from below’ to examine how conformist-innovative behaviour—adaptation through creative norm violations—became a prevailing response to systemic injustice during both the Soviet period and the post-1990 transformations following independence. Using theoretical frameworks such as Merton’s anomie theory and Bourdieu’s notion of ‘delinquent habitus’, the chapter demonstrates that these adaptive strategies not only enabled survival but also functioned as symbolic resistance, operating as a form of social punishment directed at those who created or upheld unjust systems. Practices such as stealing from collective farms, informal labour, tax evasion, or rule-bending were often perceived not as crimes but as morally justified responses to conditions that failed to ensure dignified living standards. This dimension of punitiveness, understood as an emotional and cultural reaction to experienced injustice, extends beyond the legal sphere and becomes embedded in everyday practices, attitudes, and informal conceptions of justicejustice.