The Law Is Politics
FEIFER, GEORGE
The Law Is Politics Settling Disputes in Soviet Society. By John Hazard. Columbia. 534 pp. $9.50. Reviewed by George Feifer Contributor, "Harper's" New York "Times Magazine" THE "HEROES" OF...
...This now familiar apology was made then with sincere regret: To these men, Communism was not a mirage but real greenery on a not-too-distant horizon...
...Gradually but steadily throughout the formative years, complex jurisdictional and procedural arrangements were established...
...Reviewed by George Feifer Contributor, "Harper's" New York "Times Magazine" THE "HEROES" OF Professor John Hazard's study of the formative years of the Soviet legal institutions (1918-24) are the first Commissars of Justice, P. I. Stuchka, N. V. Krylenko and especially D. I. Kurskii...
...The Georgian, equipped with OGPU boards and henchmen within the legal profession, destroyed the work of the early Commissars—and then purged them...
...The Cheka had been abolished—largely through their efforts—and disputes were being settled in a manner familiar to other European societies...
...But they are essential to students of Soviet society...
...We are not anarchists, rejecting all law...
...Why...
...What led them to re-establish, for example, the procuracy—hated symbol of Imperial oppression...
...but it makes no better sense to ignore the law...
...This was 1918-24, not 1930-36...
...their quiet, persistent struggle for legality seemed to have been successful: the revolutionary fervor largely spent, a legal system worthy of the name was beginning to function...
...But they were educated, rational, principled men who believed that Communism is not incompatible with a fair trial and who dedicated themselves to securing both...
...For they were also competent, principled jurists, whose ideas about proper settlement of conflicts were classic...
...Were disputes in Soviet society to be settled by a simple process understandable to all—by a counterpart to the wise man of primitive society perhaps, or by "social consciousness"—or through the intricacies of an esoteric legal system similar in form to the Imperial system which they had destroyed...
...Overshadowed by the political giants of those years—Lenin, Trotsky...
...We are now in the transitional stage," he wrote...
...the Commissars were lawyers, not terrorists...
...Like all heroes, however, these minor ones were faced with a crucial dilemma...
...Much of this book is a detailed examination of codes, procedures, acts and amendments which transformed simplicity to complexity...
...the first Commissar, published an unofficial guide for People's Courts—or for those operating the courts who could read—he began the drift toward complexity...
...This is not to say that the Commissars were not Marxists who believed that law is politics...
...Although Stalin is rarely mentioned in this book, his presence hangs over it...
...But their real reasons were not unlike Hamilton's arguments for a central judiciary in the Federalist Papers...
...Such qualities, they thought, were inherently more just—and would start the law withering away...
...But the makers of the rules and codes were not evil geniuses seeking to undermine the rights of individuals or the rule of law...
...When state security required that legality give way, they acquiesced—but reluctantly...
...Zino-viev, Stalin—these jurists were not charismatic figures...
...Hazard's answer, the "plot" of his book, is not a description of Bolshevism's arbitrary methods and vengeful motives...
...By 1924, after several major judicial acts had been legislated, criminal and civil codes and codes of criminal and civil procedure—all modeled on the Imperial codes—were adopted...
...The "heroes" were destined to become tragic...
...The civil code, although Hazard does not mention it...
...And by 1924 they thought that security and legality were no longer in conflict...
...on the contrary, they concluded sadly that centralization and formalization were necessary protections against the arbitrary pressures which peryaded those years...
...rather than some '"higher" concept, because simplicity did not work...
...Was Soviet justice to be informal, local and "natural," or rigidly formalistic, a product of centralized machinery attached to the state...
...And chaos, Stuchka saw, was chaos, not Communism...
...then, did they construct complex, formal, centralized institutions...
...When in the summer of 1918 Stuchka...
...Though illustrated at times by fascinating cases from the courts, these pages will not excite the general reader...
...They christened it Soviet "law...
...Courts, where they existed at all, were mockeries of courts...
...was taken almost directly from a draft under consideration when the Revolution interrupted...
...By 1924...
...Kurskii and the others yearned for simplicity, for court procedures understandable to the untrained citizen...
...But Stuchka was faced with chaos in the new country...
...Never fully happy with their complexity, they argued weakly that it was justified by being socialist rather than bourgeois...
...Certainly it makes no sense to view that society solely through the law...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 44
