As with all such events, the Bolshevik Revolution was messy. It counted on huge popular participation and disruption in the main industrial cities of the empire and jacqueries in the countryside. Other revolutions unfolded over time – such as in China and Vietnam – in the sense that they emerged victorious from a protracted process of warfare, during which major institutions were forged. Others took some time to even start to think about how they would reorganize the state on a permanent basis – this was the case of Cuba. Law, as part of the ‘bourgeois state’, was not really favoured by Marxist revolutionaries (nor by anarchists, for that matter, though social democrats became very fond of it). First, law was to be exercised by popular courts and the like. Eventually, in the period of ‘real socialism’ and even more so today, in post-postmodern states, the bureaucracy and the legal professions that were to be discarded by socialism and communism made a comeback. As is well known, the judiciary is a part of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, although, like the army in this regard, a very specialized part of it (though both, especially the latter, can and have, in authoritarian collectivism as much as in liberal states, taken up political roles at several moments and in different areas). In this, too, authoritarian collectivism ended up replicating some basic features of ‘capitalist states’, once it left behind the messy period of popular courts and judgements (Grzybowski 1962; Hazard 1969). Yet some crucial changes took place too, at least in what regards the imaginary, and not for the better. This leads us directly towards a discussion of the role of rights in authoritarian collectivism.

Initially, the Russian Revolution had a very indirect approach to rights, speaking of the rights of workers but never taking them as natural rights or rights that accrue universally to individuals qua individuals. That being said, the constitutional development of the Soviet Union was part of what may be termed social constitutionalism since the very beginning. Its main jurists in the 1910s–20s, above all Piet I. Stuchka and Eugeny Pashukanis, despite divergent understandings of law, believed it would disappear in the process of constructing socialism, withering away along with capitalism and, above all, the state.