Table Of ContentREVOLUTION
IN LAW
REVOLUTION
IN LAW
Contributions to the Development of
Soviet Legal Theory, 1917-1938
Edited by Piers Beirne
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1990 by M.E. Sharpe
Published 2015 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Revolution in law: contributions to the development of soviet legal theory, 1917-
1938 I Piers Beirne, editor.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-87332-560-5 :
1. Law-Soviet Union-History and criticism. 2. Law and socialism-
History. I. Beirne, Piers.
lAW
349.47-dc20
[344.7] 89-29816
CIP
ISBN 13: 9780873325608 (hbk)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Editor's Introduction ix
Chapter 1
Perspectives on Legal Culture in Prerevolutionary Russia
Susan Eva Heuman 3
Chapter2
Toward a General Theory of Law and Marxism:
E. B. Pashukanis
Piers Beirne and Robert Sharlet 17
Chapter3
P. I. Stuchka and Soviet Law
Robert Sharlet, Peter B. Maggs, and Piers Beirne 45
Chapter4
Law and the Constitution of Soviet Society:
The Case of Comrade Lenin
Piers Beirne and Alan Hunt 61
Chapter 5
Lenin, Crime, and Penal Politics, 1917-1924
Piers Beirne and Alan Hunt 99
Chapter6
In Search of Vyshinsky: The Paradox of Law and Terror
Robert Sharlet and Piers Beirne 136
Chapter?
Nikolai Vasil' evich Krylenko: A Reevaluation
Donald D. Barry 157
ChapterS
Vyshinsky, Krylenko, and Soviet Penal Politics
in the 1930s
Eugene Huskey 173
Index 191
About the Contributors 201
Preface and Acknowledgments
The current period of glasnost' has clearly opened up something other than yet
another phase in the seeming! y endless Soviet process of purging and rehabilitation.
Soviet legal scholars are now attempting to reassess the significance of the mass
repression of the 1930s, and they are doing so with a measure of candor not seen
since the 1920s. Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet
Legal Theory, 1917-1938 is a collection of recently published and original work
by Western scholars that seeks to facilitate reassessment of the history of Soviet
law from the October revolution to the year of the great show trials. A companion
volume will cover the period from 1938 to the present.
A collaborative work like this incurs a multitude of debts. Bob Sharlet, Steve
Redhead, David Trubek, and Zig Zile will each know why I wish to acknowledge
their respective kindnesses first. In various ways Maureen Cain, Alan Hunt, Gene
Huskey, Bob Kidder, and Peter Solomon made this a better collection than it
otherwise would have been. Sundry electronic tricks were performed by Wanda
M. Gilpatrick, Dennis Patterson, and Peter Lehman. Rosy Miller, Elaine Shuman,
and Martha Lippa valiantly performed much of the time-consuming work of
checking and updating the references for several chapters in this collection that,
for one reason or another, Soviet legal theorists failed to do themselves. Susan
Corrente has gracefully shown me that the "withering away of law" is neither so
realistic nor so desirable an objective as I once imagined.
I wish also to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, which
generously provided the opportunity for my initial collaboration with Robert
Sharlet and Peter Maggs nearly a decade ago. The University of Southern Maine
assisted me in various ways, and I am most appreciative of the administrative
kindnesses of Patricia Plante and Dave Davis.
vii
Editor's Introduction
Piers Belme
In late 1917, after the sudden collapse of the Russian Provisional Government, the
Bolsheviks found themselves altogether lacking in theoretical direction for the role
of law during the transitional period between capitalism and communism. For
Bolshevik theorists of state and law the several strands of existing legal theory
presented, in concert, a formidable obstacle to the development of a Marxist theory
oflaw.
Russian jurisprudence was dominated, until approximately the end of the civil
war, by foreign, non-Marxist theories about the origins and purposes oflaw. Neither
the legal positivism of Hans Kelsen nor the social functionalism of the Austrian
jurist Karl Renner (although both were popular and widely read) afforded much of
a basis for the development of a Marxist theory of law. Alongside these was the
pervasive influence of German philosophical idealism; its ambassadors were
numerous, but the names of Jhering, Laband, Jellinek, Windsheid, and Dernburg
constantly recur as authoritative sources in Russian juristic treatises of the time.
Following from the inauguration of the Pandektist Civil Code and the
Methodenstreit debates within philosophical idealism, the legacy of late-nine-
teenth-century German social theory was the view that the core of the social
universe was the individual, volitional agent whose rights and obligations were
expressed in legal rules. This atomistic legacy of the idealist literature was most
prominently received in the psychologism of Leon Petrazhitsky, a supporter of the
conservative Russian Kadet party. Its message was dismissed as legalistic poppy-
cock by the Bolsheviks, who chose instead to discover in any and all legal discourse
the simple reflections of the material and ideological relations of social classes.
Nor did the writings of Marx or Engels seem to offer much beyond a paralyzing
legal nihilism. While Marx himself had written extensively about the complex
articulation of law within different modes of production, his writings on law and
socialism were sparse, polemical, and always utopian. Marx's well-known state-
ments to the effect that the state was "butthe executive committee for managing
ix
