The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Jurist: Evgeny Pashukanis and Stalinism 17 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 2004

17 Can. J. L. & Jurisprudence 269 (2004)
The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Jurist: Evgeny Pashukanis and Stalinism

handle is hein.journals/caljp17 and id is 271 raw text is: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Jurist:
Evgeny Pashukanis and Stalinism
Michael Head
Introduction
One question looms large in the early history of Soviet legal theory and practice:
how and why did Evgeny Pashukanis emerge as the pre-eminent Soviet jurist from
1924 to 1930, come under only minor criticism from 1930 to 1936 and then be
denounced and executed in 1937 as a Trotskyite saboteur? Of course, Pashukanis
was not alone. Virtually every leading figure associated with the October 1917
Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union fell victim to Stalin's
purges by 1937 (from Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin to thousands of
less-known socialists).Yet, there are some particularly revealing aspects in the case
of Pashukanis that have not been probed adequately by Western or Soviet writers.
His rise to leadership of Soviet legal work in 1924, with the publication of his The
General Theory of Law and Marxism,' coincided with Stalin's initial victory over
the Left Opposition and the enunciation of Stalin's program of seeking to build
socialism in one country.
Beirne and Sharlet comment:
When the General Theory first appeared it is doubtful that anyone, least of all
Pashukanis himself, could have foreseen its immediate success and the meteoric rise
of its author within Marxist legal philosophy and the Soviet legal profession.2
But the authors do not relate Pashukanis' unexpected emergence from obscurity
to the fact that he publicly lined up against the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky
as early as 1925. Pashukanis joined in the concerted drive that was launched to dis-
credit Trotsky for his alleged Menshevism, based on his differences with Lenin
at the time of the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903. In an article
on Lenin and Problems of Law, Pashukanis drew a crude parallel between the
1903 split and the charges of bureaucratism levelled against Stalin's faction by the
Opposition.
When after the Second Congress, Lenin's opponents had conducted a struggle against
'bureaucratic formalism,' they constructed their argument on a deeper and, it seemed,
more Marxist understanding of the course of historical development. Lenin, of course,
did not think of concealing the fact that his organisational plan had a more definite
political significance: to protect the Party from opportunism.'
1. Pashukanis' main treatise was originally published in the Soviet Union in 1924. It was published
in a new English translation, Pashukanis, Law and Marxism, A General Theory, trans. Barbara
Einhorn (London: Inks Links, 1978), which is the edition that will be cited (as Pashukanis) in
this article.
2. P. Beirne & R. Sharlet, eds., Pashukanis: Selected Writings on Marxism and Law (London:
Academic Press, 1980) at 37.
3. Ibid. at 152.

Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence

Vol. XVII, No.2 (July 2004)

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