Abstract
Soviet law cannot be analyzed and understood as a mere phase of the development of Russian law. Its artificial and specific character is confirmed by the fact that it may and has been adopted almost without change by countries with a totally different history and legal structure. All parts of the Soviet legal system (State law, Labor and Land law, Criminal code, and even provisions supporting the existing social stratification in the Soviet Union) are closely connected with the Integral Planning System and characterize the peculiar ‘Soviet Socialism’. For the same reasons any essential evolution of the existing Soviet legal order is impossible unless the whole system is changed, and the existing legal order may be considered as a stabilized system.
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References
G. C. Guins, Obshchaiia teoriia prava na osnovakh sravnitelnoi psychologii i srav-nitelnogo pravovedeniia. Harbin, 1937.
‘Communist morality,’ according to Lenin, ‘is an instrument for destroying the old society of exploiters;’ ‘a struggle for the strengthening and consummation of communism as the basis of Communist ethics.’ Lenin, Sobranie Sochinenii (Collection of Works), Vol. XXX, 1932 ed., pp. 411–13.
The educative character of law was acknowledged by Vyshinskii in his article ‘Zakonnost Revolutsionnaia’ in Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopedia, Moscow, 1933, Vol. XXVI, p. 90.
Chapter X, Articles 118–133 of the Constitution.
Stalin’s interview with H. G. Wells, July 23, 1934, and with Roy Howard in 1936.
A. Vyshinskii, ‘International Law and International Organization’, Sovetskoe Gosudartsvo i Pravo, 1948, Vol. I, p. 19.
Time, August 30, 1948.
N.N. Pohansky, ‘The Soviet Criminal Court as a conductor of the policy of the Party and the Soviet regime,’ Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta (Moscow University Herald) No. 11, November, 1950, pp. 125–39. Translated in the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, March, 22, 1952, pp. 8–11.
Pashukanis, a former academician and recognized authority in the field of Socialist legal theory; author of several works, was later denounced, declared a wrecker, and disappeared into obscurity.
‘We are encircled,’ said Lenin in a speech on November 26, 1920, at a meeting of Communist Party secretaries, ‘by imperialist states which hate us Bolsheviks to the depths of their souls.’ The same idea was expressed by Stalin in his famous letter to a member of the Comsomol, Ivanov, and repeated again, after the War, in his pre-election speech of February 9, 1946 (see The Annals, Amer. Acad, of Polit. Science, May, 1949, pp. 125, 192. Hereafter called the Annals). The most positive statement of this trend is found, however, in Zhdanov’s speech, and in the Declaration of the Cominform in September, 1947 (Bolshevik, October 15, 1947).
Lenin’s Machiavellian recipe was formulated in 1920 in connection with the Second Congress of the Comintern (See Lenin’s Sochineniia, Ed. 4, Vol. 31, pp. 194, 202, 419–20, 444 and 484) : ‘...we must use the antagonism between the two existing systems of capitalism ...between the two groups of capitalist states—in such way as to set one against the other.’ Since the imperialists were vastly more powerful militarily and economically, Lenin recommended the protection of the Soviet Republic ‘by other means.’
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© 1954 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Guins, G.C. (1954). Introduction A Legal Approach to the Study of Communism. In: Soviet Law and Soviet Society. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0869-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0869-8_1
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