A Framework for the Analysis of Soviet Law

Abstract

Alongside many descriptive accounts of Soviet law is a substantial and growing interpretive literature on Soviet legal thought and behavior. The work of legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, this literature is heterogenous in its conceptual starting points. Traditionalists, for example, approach law in USSR as an instrument of power that masks and legitimates single will of party or leader., In this view, law is part repressive tool, part window dressing, but it is also, and more subtly, a means of convincing population of rectitude of dictatorial rule.1 Like Rousseau, Soviet leaders recognize that the strongest man is never strong enough to remain forever master, unless he transforms his might into right and obedience into duty.2 Other students of Soviet law, influenced by group theories of social sciences, emphasize role of bureaucratic politics in shaping of Soviet legal policy and behavior. From this perspective, law is product, not of a single rational will, but of a contest among competing institutional claims. Through this conceptual lens, for example, one may view paradoxical coexistence of law and terror in late 1930s as result of a struggle between advocates of open, legalized repression (Vyshinsky's Procuracy) and advocates of secret, summary terror (the NKVD), with Stalin serving as arbiter of