Law And The Making Of The Soviet World

This book is an unconventional reappraisal of Soviet law: a field that is ripe for re-evaluation, now that it is clear of Cold War cobwebs; and, as this book shows, one that is surprisingly topical and newly compelling. Scott Newton argues here that the Soviet order was a work of law. Drawing on a wide range of sources – including Russian-language Soviet statues and regulations, jurisprudence, legal theory, and English-language ‘legal Kremlinology’ – this book analyses the central significance of law in the design and operation of Soviet economic, political, and social institutions. In arguing that it was an exemplary, rather than aberrant, case of the uses to which law was put in twentieth-century industrialised societies, Law and the Making of the Soviet World: The Red Demiurge provides an insightful account of both the significance of modern law in the Soviet case and the significance of the Soviet case for modern law.

This book explains an interaction between Soviet Russia and the West that has been overlooked in much of the analysis of the demise of the USSR. Legislation strikingly similar to the Marxist-inspired laws of Soviet Russia found its way into the legal systems of the Western world. Even though Western governments were at odds with the Soviet government, they were affected by the ideas it put forth. Western law was transformed radically during the course of the twentieth century, and much of that change was along lines first charted in Soviet law.

This book looks at the Soviet style of law that was adopted slowly in the West during the twentieth century.

Organized in the immediate aftermath of World War II to try the former Nazi leaders for war crimes, the Nuremberg trials, known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT), paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this immersive new history of the trials, a central piece of the story has been routinely omitted from standard accounts: the critical role that the Soviet Union played in making Nuremberg happen in the first place. Hirsch's book reveals how the Soviets shaped the trials--only to be written out of their story as Western allies became bitter Cold War rivals. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers the first full picture of the war trials, illuminating the many ironies brought to bear as the Soviets did their part to bring the Nazis to justice. Everyone knew that Stalin had originally allied with Hitler before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung heavy over the courtroom, as did the suspicion among the Western prosecutors and judges that the Soviets had falsified evidence in an attempt to pin one of their own war crimes, the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, on the Nazis. It did not help that key members of the Soviet delegation, including the Soviet judge and chief prosecutor, had played critical roles in Stalin's infamous show trials of the 1930s. For the lead American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and his colleagues, Soviet participation in the Nuremberg Trials undermined their overall credibility and possibly even the moral righteousness of the Allied victory. Yet Soviet jurists had been the first to conceive of a legal framework that treated war as an international crime. Without it, the IMT would have had no basis for judgment. The Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting against Germany--enduring the horrors of the Nazi occupation and experiencing almost unimaginable human losses and devastation. There would be no denying their place on the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Once the trials were set in motion, however, little went as the Soviets had planned. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg shows how Stalin's efforts to direct the Soviet delegation and to steer the trials from afar backfired, and how Soviet war crimes became exposed in open court. Hirsch's book offers readers both a front-row seat in the courtroom and a behind-the-scenes look at the meetings in which the prosecutors shared secrets and forged alliances. It reveals the shifting relationships among the four countries of the prosecution (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the USSR), uncovering how and why the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg became a Cold War battleground. In the process Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a new understanding of the trials and a fresh perspective on the post-war movement for human rights.

This text provides a survey of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. It traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of several official national languages and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programmes.

Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR. Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

By examining the relationship between international law and empire from early modernity to the present, this volume improves current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped imperial ideas about and structures of world governance.

This book undertakes the first comparative constitutional analysis of the Kyrgyz Republic and Republics of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in their cultural, historical, political, economic and social context. The first chapter provides a general overview of the diverse and dynamic constitutional landscape across the region. A second chapter examines the Soviet constitutional system in depth as the womb of the Central Asian States. A third chapter completes the general picture by examining the constitutional influences of the 'new world order' of globalisation, neoliberalism, and good governance into which the five states were thrust. The remaining five chapters look in turn at the constitutional context of presidents and governments, parliaments and elections, courts and rights, society and economy and culture and identity. The enquiry probes the regional patterns of neo-Sovietism, plebiscitary elections, weak courts and parliaments, crony capitalism, and constraints on association, as well as the counter-tendencies that strengthen democracy, rights protection and pluralism. It reveals the Central Asian experience to be emblematic of the principal issues and tensions facing contemporary constitutional systems everywhere.