Andrei Vyshinskii, The Law of the Soviet State. 1938

In this excerpt from a 1938 Soviet law textbook edited by Andrei Vyshinskii, the “Stalin Constitution” is presented as the pinnacle of socialist democracy and, at the same time, the legal expression of proletarian dictatorship. Vyshinskii insists that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not “anarchy,” but a regime of strict order, discipline, and enforceable rules, meant to stabilize social relations and defend socialist property until the distant moment when law itself is supposed to “wither away".

Original Source: Советское государственное право: Учебник для юридических институтов / Под общ. ред. А. Я. Вышинского. М.: Юридическое издательство НКЮ СССР, 1938.

The proletariat requires the state, state apparatus, a definite state order-the socialist legal order, which signifies the stability of socialist social relationships and of socialist discipline, respect for the rules of socialist life in common, respect and preservation inviolate of social, socialist property-the bases of the entire Soviet order, the observance of all Soviet laws. Special forms of the class struggle correspond to the epoch of the proletarian dictatorship, and the state during this period is confronted with special problems related to those forms and responsive to the demands of this period...

The dictatorship of the proletariat solves the problems of the proletarian revolution both with the aid of law and with the assistance of measures strictly defined by statute, through administrative and judicial organs. The dictatorship of the proletariat is authority unlimited by any statutes whatever. But the dictatorship of the proletariat, creating its own laws, makes use of them, demands that they be observed, and punishes breach of them. Dictatorship of the proletariat does not signify anarchy and disorder but, on the contrary, strict order and firm authority which operates upon strict principles, set out in the fundamental law of the proletarian state-the Soviet Constitution...

The greatest expression of the development of proletarian democracy-and at the same time of the organic synthesis of the principles thereof and of the proletarian dictatorship-is the Stalin Constitution, which records in the form of law the brilliant and epoch-making triumphs of socialism. It is at the same time the greatest monument of Soviet socialist law, the greatest historical act, in which is expressed the will of the Soviet people, the will of the working classes. The Stalin Constitution signifies the ultimate strengthening of the Soviet order, of the proletarian dictatorship, which rests on a still more mighty socialist basis than had ever existed in the previous twenty years of the history of our socialist revolution. It reveals the ultimate essence of socialist democracy, which is the direct consequence of the triumph of the proletarian dictatorship and the integration of the development of the Soviet socialist state order...

As a means of control on the part of society, a means of regulating social relationships, a method and means of preserving the interests of socialist society and the rights and interests of citizens, Soviet law carries out a social function of gigantic importance -without which the socialist state could not get along until that time when it completely withers away.

Law-like the state-will wither away only in the highest phase of communism, with the annihilation of the capitalist encirclement; when all will learn to get along without special rules defining the conduct of people under the threat of punishment and with the aid of constraint; when people are so accustomed to observe the fundamental rules of community life that they will fulfill them without constraint of any sort. Until then, however, there is necessity for general control, firm discipline in labor and in community life, and complete subordination of all the new society's work to a truly democratic state ...

Stuchka characterized Soviet civil law and the Soviet Civil Code as basically bourgeois phenomena. He flatly declared all the law of the period of the New Economic Policy to be bourgeois, asserting that we have simply "imported, borrowed, bourgeois law."

Our new (and we may say here our first) codes were to him the result of concessions to bourgeois law," as "landmarks of retreat" - thus repeating the anti-Leninist fabrications of Zinoviev and Bukharin and transferring Trotskyite-Zinovievite principles into the field of legal theory. In The Revolutionary Role of Soviet Law, Stuchka wrote that he had succeeded "with the help of his comrades" in formulating a new revolutionary dialectic conception of civil law in general and of our Soviet civil law in particular. This new conception, for whose invention Stuchka takes special credit, was the notorious theory of so-called "economic" law whereby, as everyone knows, Stuchka and some of his pupils understood a part of the civil law embracing questions of an administrative-economic character...

The "new, revolutionary-dialectic conception," proudly proclaimed by Stuchka, dwindled to the night-opportunist "theory" of "two-section law," merely contrasting the interests of socialist economy with those of the socialist man, and underestimating the civil law as law which regulates, affirms, and preserves the individual and property interests of the toiling citizens of the USSR, the builders of socialism.

This is a coarse perversion of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin theory of socialism - as to the place and part of individuality in socialist society.

"Socialism does not deny individual interests-it amalgamates them with those of the group. Socialism cannot be isolated from individual interests-only socialist society can most completely satisfy them. Moreover, socialist society represents the only firm guarantee that individual interests will be preserved" (Stalin).

These teachings of Stalin define also the path of development of Soviet civil law and the problems before us in this field -problems of developing and reinforcing Soviet civil law.

The extent of the perversions in the field of the Marxist-Leninist theory of law is particularly apparent in the liquidation of the discipline of Soviet civil law by Stuchka and his followers, who have now come actually to be wreckers and traitors. The whole depth of these perversions is particularly conspicuous in our time, when the greatest of human constitutions, the Stalin Constitution, allots a particularly honored place to the civil rights of Soviet people, when civil legal relationships are raised, in conditions of socialist society, to the highest degree of their development. Unfortunately the perversions of the Marxist theory of law went far deeper than would be inferred from the foregoing. A group of traitors, headed by Pashukanis and others, sat for a number of years in the former Institute of Soviet Construction and Law, and systematically practiced the distortion of the fundamental and most important principles of Marxist-Leninist methodology in the field of law ...

... Each in his field wrought not a little to pervert the great doctrine of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, so as to disarm Soviet jurists and expose them to the putrid vapor of all kinds of anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist "theories" whereby our enemies sought to sully the pure source of great and truly scientific thought. Because of the work of these wreckers over a period of years, the extremely rich scientific inheritance of Marx-Engels-Lenin, and the equally rich works of Stalin, which guarantee the further development of Soviet legal science, remained unutilized and insufficiently elaborated...

They denied the very possibility of the development of Soviet law as socialist law. They tried mechanically to transfer the legal institutions of one epoch (that of imperialistic capitalism) into another (that of socialism), perverting the basic methodological settings of Marxism-Leninism, which teaches that law, or the legal superstructure, can and must be explained in the last analysis out of the economic structure of society, out of its relationships of production...

Source: A. Vyshinskii, ed., The Law of the Soviet State (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 47-48, 52, 54-57.