UDC

930

Authors

Zemtsov Boris Nikolaevich
Bauman Moscow State Technical University str. 1, 5, 2-ya Baumanskaya St., Moscow, 105005, Russian Federation; e-mail: zemtsovbn@mail.ru

Abstract

This article analyses the objective prerequisites for the violation of socialist legality in the Soviet Union. According to the author, these prerequisites can be divided into pre-revolutionary and postrevolutionary (after 1917). Among pre-revolutionary conditions he names, first and foremost, the national legal culture, nihilism being its key feature. Such an attitude towards the law was typical not only of the average man and politicized intellectuals, but also of academics. The post-revolutionary prerequisites include: firstly, the coming of essentially marginalized social classes to power already in 1917; secondly, the nihilistic attitude of the new party-and-state leadership to the law; thirdly, the revolutionary party’s staying in power after the Civil War. In their view, the end justified the means, hence all the fabricated political cases. Of great importance was the fact that the Bolsheviks were trying to build a new socialist society not quite according to Marx, but could not substantiate this. Thus, the serious sociopolitical and economic problems of the party-and-state leadership in the 1920s and 1930s were not solved during preliminary theoretical discussions, but through another round of repression against hypothetically oppositional social groups. In the 1930s, the legal acts of the 1920s, democratic on the whole, were revoked. No new codes were established, so the author believes it would be more accurate to speak of the violation of socialist legality than of political repression (a politically loaded and controversial term from the scientific point of view).

Keywords

socialist society, political repressions, violation of socialist legality, Stalinism

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