Russian Legal Theory

Soviet Legal Theory

The development of Soviet legal theory was marked by profound ideological struggles over the nature and function of law under socialism. Evgeny Pashukanis, the most original Marxist legal theorist, advanced the commodity exchange theory of law in The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924). Pashukanis argued that law is a specifically bourgeois phenomenon that arises from the commodity form — the legal subject corresponds to the commodity owner, and the legal relation mirrors the exchange relation. On this view, law would “wither away” under communism along with the market relations that produced it. Pashukanis’s theory was politically influential until the late 1930s, when Stalin’s purges led to his execution and the repudiation of the “withering away” thesis.

Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor and later legal theorist, provided the official Soviet definition of law as “the aggregate of rules of conduct expressed in statutes enacted by the state power and also in custom and general rules sanctioned by state power, reflecting the will of the ruling class and backed by the coercive force of the state.” This instrumentalist conception treated law as an instrument of state policy and class domination, integral to the construction of socialism rather than destined to disappear. The principle of sotsialisticheskaya zakonnost (socialist legality) demanded strict adherence to enacted law as a tool of socialist construction, though in practice it was subordinated to the imperatives of Party rule.

The Post-Soviet Natural Law Revival

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 prompted a dramatic reorientation of Russian legal theory. The natural law tradition, suppressed during the Soviet period, experienced a significant revival as Russian legal scholars sought normative foundations for the new legal order. The 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation explicitly recognises “the principles and norms of international law” as part of the Russian legal system (Article 15(4)) and declares human rights and freedoms as the highest value (Article 2). These provisions provided constitutional grounding for natural law arguments and for the integration of international human rights standards into Russian jurisprudence.

The Rule of Law and Contemporary Debates

The concept of the pravovoye gosudarstvo (rule of law state) was formally adopted in Article 1 of the 1993 Constitution, declaring Russia a “democratic federal rule-of-law state.” The concept draws on the German Rechtsstaat tradition but has taken on distinctive meaning in the Russian context, encompassing the supremacy of the constitution, the binding of state power by law, the independence of the judiciary, and the recognition of fundamental rights. The implementation of these principles has faced persistent challenges, including the dominance of the executive, the weakness of judicial independence, and the selective application of law for political purposes.

Contemporary Russian legal scholarship is marked by an ongoing debate between legal positivism and natural law approaches. Positivist positions, inherited from the Soviet emphasis on enacted law as the exclusive source of legal obligation, compete with natural law claims that law has an inherent moral dimension that may justify resistance to unjust positive law. The Eurasian legal theory, drawing on the work of Lev Gumilev and others, argues for a distinctive Russian legal civilisation distinct from Western legal traditions, emphasising the priority of the collective over the individual and the organic unity of state, society, and law.

Integration with European Legal Traditions

Russia’s accession to the Council of Europe in 1996 and ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights in 1998 brought Russian legal theory into dialogue with European legal traditions. The judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) became a significant influence on Russian constitutional interpretation and legal reasoning, at least until the constitutional amendments of 2020 and the eventual cessation of Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe in 2022. The engagement with European legal standards has raised fundamental theoretical questions about the relationship between national sovereignty and international legal obligations and about the compatibility of Russian legal culture with European conceptions of the rule of law and fundamental rights.