M. A. Reisner, Justice in the Proletarian State. April 22, 1918

Original Source: Materialy Narodnogo Komissariata Iustitsii, No. 1 (1918), pp. 49-50.

The principle of the separation of powers, so prominent in most states, including some democratic republics, is wholly absent in the Soviet Republic. The reasons for this are as follows:

a) The separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial is primarily a political matter. It corresponds to the structure of the bourgeois state where the principal task is the balancing of the main political forces, viz., the possessing classes on the one hand and the toiling masses on the other. Being by nature an inevitable compromise between exploiters and exploited, the bourgeois state has to balance and divide power ... This balancing and dividing tempers the ferocity of class domination, and the arrangement is cherished by all states which exist for the purpose of continued oppression.

The separation of the judicial power ... has an additional advantage in that it tends to subordinate the administrative power to the judiciary in the interest of the bourgeois class, at the same time giving the character of impartiality and objectivity to what is, in fact, class justice ...

b) it is well known that in order to secure the above-mentioned impartiality of the judiciary power all bourgeois states adopt a series of measures intended to secure the independence of the judges' conscience. Among such measures are non-recall, appointment for life, high salaries, etc. Even in a democratic republic, where, by virtue of popular sovereignty, concessions had to be made to the masses, we encounter, alongside the practice of electing judges, certain remnants of the past in the form of non-recall and life tenure for members of superior courts. But the principle of non-recall never guaranteed the independence of the judges and the inviolability of the judicial conscience. On the contrary, judges appointed for life had always tended to form a special caste beyond the reach of the uninitiated and separated from the needs of the people by a high impenetrable wall, thus making them narrower and more intolerant defenders of the dominant class. One can say without exaggeration that in a bourgeois society the jurists are the most determined defenders of capitalism.

c) The Russian Socialist Republic has no interest in any division or balancing of political forces, for the simple reason that it bases itself on the domination of one all-embracing force, i.e., the Russian proletariat and the peasant masses. This political force is engaged in the realization of a single end, the establishment of a socialist order, and this heroic struggle requires unity and concentration of power rather than division. Furthermore, our Republic stands in no need of hiding or camouflaging its purposes, and, in so far as it leads an active fight against counterrevolutionary forces, it comes out openly with its Revolutionary Tribunals as a weapon of revolutionary struggle. Finally, our Republic is based on the sense of justice possessed by the masses and not on the justice of the oppressors, so that the thing we need is not an artificial system of rights and laws imposed from above but a system of rights emerging from the masses, In the same way our Republic does not need a caste of trained and cunning jurists who, under the guise of the law, defend the narrow interests of a propertied minority; we need judges able to understand and interpret the sense of right inherent in the masses. We need a people's court, elective, subject to recall, and amalgamated with the Soviet Government by an identity of purpose and the revolutionary struggle ...

Source: James Bunyan and H.H. Fisher, ed., Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918; Documents and Materials (Stanford: Stanford University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 577-579.