The socialist revolution in Russia introduced large-scale nationalisations and land reforms in order to empower the peasantry and the proletariat with a vision of establishing the ‘first worker’s state’.2 A key instrument in this undertaking was the nationalisation of private property, a transformation that was legal in nature. Indeed, as Scott Newton put it: ‘the elimination of private ownership of the means of production remains a breathtaking and unexampled demonstration of the puissance of law’.3