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Vyshinskii, Krylenko, and the Shaping of the Soviet Legal Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Eugene Huskey
Eugene Huskey*
Affiliation:
Department of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College
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Extract

Students of the Soviet Union have been reassessing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s. By shifting the focus of research from high politics to the constituent parts of the political and social system, recent scholarship has exposed the confusion and conflicts that plagued the nascent Soviet bureaucracy as it struggled to put down roots in the country and to satisfy the enormous demands placed upon it by the center and periphery. This research has brought new recognition of the extent to which the political leadership in the 1930s was bedeviled by local resistance to central directives, by poor communication and inadequate staffing in the bureaucracy, and by the low “cultural level” of those asked to implement policy.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 46 , Issue 3-4 , Fall/Winter 1987 , pp. 414 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1987

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References

This paper benefited from the comments of Peter Solomon and an anonymous reviewer and from the financial support of the Bowdoin College Faculty Research Fund.

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5. Although the writings of the legal theorist Evgenii Pashukanis gave rise to the legal nihilismof the second revolution, the legal bureaucrat Krylenko took the lead in the legal policy debates andin the personal and institutional struggle for control of the legal system. While critical of law as abourgeois vestige, Pashukanis seemed more reluctant than Krylenko to dispense with the legal form inthe 1930s. On his attempt to moderate the radical position of Krylenko on the reform of criminalprocedure during the second revolution, see Huskey, Eugene, Russian Lawyers and the Soviet State; The Origins and Development of the Soviet Bar 1917–1939 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 171–173.Google Scholar

6. Vyshinskii and the legal moderates were not seeking, of course, a return to bourgeois jurisprudencebut the development of a Soviet law of the transition period that contained bourgeois admixtures. Vyshinskii's position in the 1930s recalled the critique leveled at the end of NEP by PetrStuchka, Andrei Piontkovskii, and others against Pashukanis's commodity exchange theory of law.On the moderate-nihilist debates on legal theory in the last half of the 1920s, see Robert Sharlet, “Pashukanis and the Commodity Exchange Theory of Law: A Study of Marxist Legal Thought” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1968).

7. By the mid-1930s more than half of judicial cadres had no legal training whatsoever, and of the 220 persons registered to teach law only 8 had a kandidat or doctoral degree. “Na soveshchaniisudebnykh rabotnikov RSFSR,” Sovetskaia iustitsiia no. 24 (1936): 13.

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16. Vyshinskii oversaw the rapid growth of the journal's tirage. At the end of its first year of publishing, 8,600 copies of the monthly Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ were printed, compared with 19,500 of its bimonthly competitor Sovetskaia iustitsiia. By the time of Krylenko's arrest in 1938, the print run for the Procuracy journal reached 25,000 copies, only 5,000 shy of Sovetskaia iustitsiia, which had served since 1922 as the authoritative journal on Soviet legal affairs.

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20. This appointment was part of a broader shakeup of leading personnel in the political and legal system triggered by the fall of Avel’ Enukidze, the secretary of TsIK. Accused by NikitaKhrushchev and others of “rotten liberalism” for his attempts to shield coworkers from the effects ofthe post-Kirov purge, Enukidze was replaced as TsIK secretary by Procurator General I. A. Akulov,thus enabling Vyshinskii to assume the highest post in the USSR Procuracy. “Doklad tov.Khrushcheva na sobranii moskovskogo partiinogo aktiva,” Pravda, 16 June 1935, p. 3.

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29. Vyshinskii, “Rech’ tov. Stalina,” p. 6; Vyshinskii, A., “Rasshirenie sovetskoi demokratii i sud— o nekotorykh voprosakh organizatsii sovetskoi iustitsii,” SIu, no. 19 (1936): 10–12.Google Scholar

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32. Ibid., p. 13.

33. Vyshinskii, “Rech’ tov. Stalina,” p. 7.

34. Vyshinskii, A., “Otvet na otvet,” SZ, no. 10 (1935): 29–30 Google Scholar. See also Vyshinskii, “Rol’ protsessual'nogozakona,” pp. 1–11.

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36. Ibid., p. 10. The isolation of Krylenko was made more complete by the success of Vyshinskiiin tying him to the nihilist policies of the second revolution, many of which the justice commissar had disavowed. Whether because of political expedience or the changed environment for legal development,Krylenko adopted a less radical approach to law in the mid-1930s. Under constant attack from Vyshinskii for his mistakes during the second revolution, Krylenko was never able to shed the reputation of a legal nihilist.

37. V. [Vyshinskii], “Nel'zia li bez organizatsionnoi putanitsy, plodiashchei volokity,” ZSZ, no. 6 (1935), p. 36.

38. Krylenko, , “Narkomat iustitsii Soiuza SSR i ego zadachi,” SIu, no. 23 (1936): 1–3.Google Scholar

39. Vyshinskii, , “Stalinskaia konstitutsiia i zadachi organov iustitsii,” SZ no. 8 (1936): 6–23.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., p. 20. Vyshinskii, ever the formalist in dress and manners, liked to flaunt his knowledgeof foreign languages and legal systems.

41. Solomon, “Local Folitical Power and Soviet Criminal Justice,” pp. 305–329.

42. “Vsesoiuznoe prokurorskoe soveshchanie,” SZ, no. 8 (1936): 56.

43. “Aktiv prokuratury,” SZ, no 9 (1937): 96–101.

44. “Vsesoiuznoe prokurorskoe soveshchanie,” p. 58.

45. Ibid.

46. “Aktiv prokuratury Soiuza SSR,” SZ, no. 7 (1937): 88–91.

47. “Vsesoiuznoe prokurorskoe soveshchanie,” SZ, no. 6 (1938): 9.

48. Ibid., pp. 18–20.

49. Kozhevnikov, , “Nashi kadry,” SIu, no. 35 (1935): 5.Google Scholar

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51. “Operativno-proizvodstvennoe soveshchanie v soiuznoi prokurature,” ZSZ, no. 8 (1935): 49–50.

52. Ibid.

53. “Kazhdomu narodnomu sledovateliu — velosiped!,” SIu, no. 11 (1935): 3.

54. Vyshinskii, A., “Trekhletie zakona 7/VIII 1932g.‘Ob okhrane obshchestvennoi (sotsialisticheskoi)sobstvennosti',” SIu, no. 28 (1935): 8 Google Scholar; Vyshinskii, “Rech’ tov. Stalina,” pp. 4–5; “Vsesoiuznoeprokurorskoe soveshchanie” (1936), p. 50.

55. Vyshinskii, “Rech’ tov. Stalina,” p. 3; “Vsesoiuznoe prokurorskoe soveshchanie” (1936), p. 46.

56. “Doklad t. Vyshinskego o merakh k uluchsheniiu kachestva sudebnoi i prokurorskoi raboty,” SIu, no. 13 (1934): 20.

57. Vyshinskii, “Nashi zadachi,” p. 6.

58. Ibid., p. 5.

59. Vyshinskii, A., Revoliutsionnaia zakonnost’ i zadachi sovetskoi zashchity (Moscow: Redaktsionnoizdatel'skiisektor Mosoblispolkoma, 1934), p. 27 Google Scholar.

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