The soviet legal experience in the period of war (1917-1922)

• Grant number: 17/20950-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2018
• End date: December 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Law
• Principal Investigator: Marcus Orione Gonçalves Correia
• Grantee: Guilherme da Costa Aguiar Cortez
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Direito (FD). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 marked the first proletarian revolution in history. Following the doctrines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Bolsheviks assumed the task of building a socialist order. The early years of the Russian Revolution represented a period of unprecedented juridical transformation and innovation in human history. In the initial five years of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks sought to consolidate the new regime amid resistance against counterrevolutionary armies. During this period, the newly established proletarian government produced an extraordinary number of legislative decrees that reconfigured Russian political power and legal system. The institutions of czarist-bourgeois power were dissolved and replaced by the organs of the Proletarian Power, led by the Communist Party. The dictatorship of the proletariat, espoused by Marx in his doctrine, assumed a central role in the new regime. The first Soviet Constitution was promulgated in 1918, presenting radical differences in relation to the traditional bourgeois constitutional texts. The intense legal innovation that took place in Russian territory in the early years of the Revolution was accompanied by a qualified debate among Bolshevik politicians on the nature of legal form and the role of law in the construction of socialist society. The two leading exponents of the Soviet legal scene, Petr Stucka and Evgeni Pachukanis, took opposite positions in this debate and contributed to the deepening of the Marxist theory of law. (AU)