In the autumn of 1887, Vladimir Ilich Ulianov, a young Russian of a middle-class family, enrolled to study law at the Imperial Kazan University. Ulianov was not destined, however, to do well at the university. His elder brother had just been executed for an attempt on the life of the tsar. Like his brother, Ulianov traveled in anti-tsarist circles. At the university, Ulianov associated with revolutionary-minded students, and in December of 1887 he was expelled.

Ulianov did not give up on law study, however. He applied for re-admission at Kazan. Refused there, he requested permission from the government to go abroad to a university. That, too, was refused. Knowing that he would not be admitted to any Russian university in the normal way, he applied to become an external student at the university in St. Petersburg. That route would let him qualify in law, but he would not attend classes. He would study on his own. Ulianov's mother wrote a letter in support of his application, and he was admitted.

Ulianov learned and re-learned the law of tsarist Russia. Tsarist law was distasteful to Ulianov. For him, it rationalized and reinforced unequal social relations. It ensured that the downtrodden would remain so.

Despite his disdain, the youthful Ulianov studied what he needed to learn of tsarist law. In 1891, he sat for the examination in St. Petersburg to qualify for the practice of law.

Soviet opposition to colonialism put pressure on the colonial powers to relinquish their territorial holdings. In the drafting of the UN Charter, the Soviet government argued for language on self-determination. In discussions leading to the establishment of a UN system of trusteeship that would replace the League of Nations mandates, the Soviet government stressed the need to move the trust territories to full independence. The Soviet delegate, responding to proposals for solutions that fell short of independence, said that “he did not agree that self-government alone would be an adequate objective, but emphasized the importance of independence.” The UN Charter, as finalized, reflected these positions. Without expressly calling colonialism unlawful, the Charter proclaimed self-determination of peoples as a principle of the organization.

Wars of National Liberation

In 1960, the United Nations, for the first time, did characterize colonialism as illegitimate, making clear that self-determination and colonialism were incompatible. In a resolution titled “Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” the UN General Assembly called for “immediate steps” in all territories “which have not yet attained independence, to transfer all powers to the peoples of those territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with their freely expressed will and desires, without any distinction as to race, creed or color, in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence and freedom.”

Soviet delegates at the United Nations had repeatedly called on the colonial powers to free their colonies.

As the soviet union came into cold war conflict with the West, it found itself in a minority among the major powers. The Soviet Union was isolated in a world dominated by powers hostile to it. The Soviet government viewed itself as being “encircled” by the capitalists. That situation gave an incentive to insist on defense of sovereignty. In international fora such as the United Nations, this minority posture inclined the Soviet government to seek protection from majoritarian initiatives. The sense of being encircled and the greater physical and political power of the West inclined it to protect its territory from any encroachment. The Soviet government urged doctrines that would ensure against territorial intrusions, both with respect to its own territory and the territory of other states where it vied with the West for influence.

Reservations to multilateral treaties

The Soviet Union's minority position in the United Nations made it a champion of preserving state sovereignty vis-à-vis UN procedures. When the International Court of Justice was set up as part of the United Nations, it was contemplated that most states would submit themselves to mandatory adjudication, so that the Court would become a forum for resolving major disputes between states.

To the Soviet Union, however, the Court was populated by capitalist judges, and hence not a friendly forum. Under the Court's founding statute, a state would be subject to the Court's automatic jurisdiction only if it filed a declaration to that effect.

From the moment the bolsheviks took power in Russia, Western governments worried that the Soviet idea might spread. Earlier revolutions had spread like a “contagion” – the Papal Revolution of the twelfth century, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution of the eighteenth century.

These revolutions, wrote Harold Berman, had “enormous all-Western repercussions,” namely, “a reaction of fear and hostilities in other countries – fear of the spread of the revolutionary virus, hostility toward the nation that was its bearer.” The Western world was united by ties of history and the kinship of the monarchies. What happened in one country affected another.

The process of reaction to revolution, as described by Berman, was that “when the revolution had settled down in its home country, the other countries accepted a mild version of it.” Berman detailed the impact of these revolutions, including the Bolshevik: “after the Luther revolution had subsided in Germany, absolute monarchies with a strong civil service appeared in England, France, and other countries; after the Puritan Revolution had subsided in England, constitutional monarchies and quasiparliamentary institutions emerged on the European continent in the late 1600s and early 1700s; after the French and American revolutions had subsided, the English enlarged the electorate to include the middle classes in 1832; and after the Russian Revolution had subsided, ‘socialist’ or ‘new deal’ governments appeared in the 1930s in Western Europe and the United States.”

The ascent to political power of a party espousing Marxism heightened the threat to Western governments. Soviet political and legal philosophy posed a challenge to the West on issues spanning the full breadth of the law. In regard to the economy, a new notion of rights of individuals on economic issues was espoused. Crime policy was viewed in a new light. Equality of the sexes figured prominently in Soviet thinking. Homosexuality and prostitution were analyzed anew. Even relations between nations were revisited, in particular, Western nations' control over colonies.

The Soviet analysis of economics was central to the new thinking on all issues. The revolutionaries were steeped in the Marxian analysis of capitalism. Economics, proclaimed Friedrich Engels, determined other aspects of society: “the production of the means to support human life – and, next to production, the exchange of things produced – is the basis of all social structure.”

As Marx grasped the effects of the industrial revolution and how it changed society from the rural-based economies that preceded it, he concluded that this radical change in economics had changed the political and social order.

In Russia, the government of the Bolshevik Party that emerged out of the 1917 revolution took Marx's analysis seriously. It derided Western governments for providing formal legal equality to citizens but for presiding over an economic order that kept many citizens unequal in fact.

The early Soviet reforms on paternity and adoption evoked little reaction abroad. The idea of collective paternity was abandoned in 1926 in the USSR itself, as was the abolition of private-family adoption. Neither idea was seriously considered in other countries. Soviet reforms on child-care, on illegitimate children, and on abortion exerted considerable impact beyond the borders of the USSR.

Laws on these issues underwent a sea change in the middle years of the twentieth century, taking the direction followed by the early Soviet legislation. Communal facilities for child day care came into common use, as an adjunct to the entry of women into the workforce. The status of children born out of wedlock was regularized.

Abortion Policy

In the 1920s, a prohibition against abortion was still the nearly universal rule in the West. Criminal penalties, often with severe punishments, applied to the performance of an abortion. Despite the prohibition, however, abortions were performed, often in improper medical conditions, and this fact helped keep the issue one of great public controversy.

The 1920s saw the abortion issue high on the medical agenda in many countries, and being raised as well as a political issue. The Soviet experience figured heavily. The Soviet decision in 1920 to legalize abortion “was very important for the abortion debate in other countries.” In Switzerland, leftist parties campaigned in the 1920s to legalize abortion.

Legalization campaigners pointed to the 1920 Soviet decree to show that legalization was possible.

The soviet government came to power with a battery of ideas that threatened the West. Although its ability to carry through on the ideas was uncertain, the mere positing of the ideas sufficed to make Western governments take notice. The 1917 revolution staged by the Bolsheviks in Russia sent shock waves through the industrialized West. Prime ministers and monarchs feared lest their heads be next on the chopping block, figuratively and literally.

Western leaders, albeit not with one voice and not with great consistency, initially opted to put the Bolshevik Revolution down militarily. The Bolshevik government was too great a menace to allow it to consolidate its hold on the vast territory of the tsars.

In December 1917, France and Britain concluded a secret pact for military intervention against the Bolsheviks. They agreed to fund the anti-Bolshevik forces in the south of Russia. They anticipated dividing southern Russia into spheres of influence. France would take Bessarabia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea, while Britain would take the Caucasus and Kurdistan.

World War I was still in progress, and Russia was on the Allied side against Germany. Under pressure from Germany, which rapidly moved to take over the Ukraine and threatened to go farther, the Bolsheviks concluded a unilateral peace, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Russia's withdrawal from the anti-German alliance eliminated the eastern front against Germany and left the prospect that Germany might successfully attack to the west and defeat France and Britain.

The German offensive came in the spring of 1918.

Even beyond the labor arena, a key bolshevik issue was the rights of women. All through the period leading up to the 1917 revolution, the party criticized Russia and the West for keeping women in a status of legal inferiority. When the Bolsheviks assumed power, women's equality was one of the first issues addressed, by reforms in domestic relations law. The Soviet approach broke sharply with Western law.

Western Law on Status of Spouses

Max Rheinstein, a scholar of European law, described nineteenth century family relations as “patriarchal in structure.” The husband-father was “the undisputed head; he was the ruler who governed his small realm just as the King of France, after the restoration of the Bourbons, governed his large one. The householder's subjects were his wife, his children, and his servants, domestics as well as farmhands or the craftsman's apprentices and journeymen, who often enough lived in the master's house as members of the household.” Wife beating was tacitly permitted. In English common law, a husband enjoyed the right of “chastisement” over his wife, which allowed him to beat her.

In Europe at the time, the husband was accorded a role of predominance in the marital relationship. In Swedish law, a woman was considered to be under her husband's guardianship. Under English common law, as was followed at the time in both Canada and the United States, the husband was head of the household and the legal representative of the wife.

On the issue of war and peace, the Soviet government took important initiatives. It concluded bilateral nonaggression treaties with a number of states. Even though it had not been invited by the Western powers to participate in the drafting of a treaty outlawing war, it took the opportunity, once the treaty was finalized, to ratify it. In the Pact of Paris, also called the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), states declared “that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”

The Pact of Paris was to enter into force only after being ratified by the states that participated in the drafting. The Soviet government went one step further, organizing a group of Eastern European states to put the Pact of Paris into effect apart from ratification by the drafting states. Under the protocol, the Pact of Paris became binding immediately on states ratifying the protocol and would remain binding on them even if the Pact of Paris were not to gain enough ratifications to enter into force. The Soviet government ratified the protocol and secured ratification by Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Romania.

The Soviet government then initiated the conclusion of two treaties, also involving Eastern European states, to define aggression. The Pact of Paris had made no effort to define aggression.

Law did not wither away in the West, but important innovations were introduced, turning the law in directions that brought features commonly identified as distinguishing the law of the twentieth century from that of the nineteenth. The state assumed a role in society it had not previously taken. The state came to be responsible for the well-being of the citizenry in many aspects of life: for ensuring delivery of health care, for ensuring full employment, for providing security in old age.

The state also came to be responsible for ensuring the equality of citizens, not only before state agencies, but in the realm of relations between individuals and business entities. Discrimination on the basis of race or other status came to be prohibited, whether by the state or by employers. Even when by private employers, the state was viewed as having a responsibility. The state should not allow discrimination by private employers.

The state took on responsibility for the safety of workers from hazards on the job, from the vicissitudes of the market that might result in employment. A worker dismissed by an employer would be entitled to be paid a salary for a time after being dismissed, by way of unemployment compensation.

The state provided for a “safety net” for the citizenry, to avert extreme poverty. Although this responsibility came to be handled variously in different Western countries, a general obligation of the state was recognized.

The Route of Change

No one has a patent on ideas.

Despite the long-term vision of the withering away of the state, the Soviet concept of state responsibility for provision of services implied a strong role for the state. As a planned economy replaced private industry and commerce under the Soviet government, it became apparent that the state would play a major part in organizing the life of Soviet society.

During the 1930s, the Soviet government established a political and economic order based on a high concentration of both political and economic authority. The Soviet government directed the nation's economy, investing profits to promote industrialization. To solidify that political and economic order, it gave itself the power to make its new economic order function. Strong authority was exercised by a single political party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by the executive branch of government. Governmental planning of the economy involved strong direction from the central authorities.

In substantive law, the most visible changes were in commercial law. As the state assumed the administration of the economy, it established legal forms for commercial activity within the state sector.

The theory behind centralization was to build society to a point at which it could satisfy the needs of all its members on a basis of equality, and which would set the basis for a drastic reduction in governmental authority. All would receive what they need, rather than receive on the basis of what they produce.