Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia

Landmarks in the Destiny of a Great Power

Bill Bowring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134625871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the destiny of a great power brings into sharp focus several key episodes in Russia's vividly ideological engagement with law and rights. Drawing on 30 years of experience of consultancy and teaching in many regions of Russia and on library research in Russian-language texts, Bill Bowring provides unique insights into people, events and ideas.

The book starts with the surprising role of the Scottish Enlightenment in the origins of law as an academic discipline in Russia in the eighteenth century. The Great Reforms of Tsar Aleksandr II, abolishing serfdom in 1861 and introducing jury trial in 1864, are then examined and debated as genuine reforms or the response to a revolutionary situation. A new interpretation of the life and work of the Soviet legal theorist Yevgeniy Pashukanis leads to an analysis of the conflicted attitude of the USSR to international law and human rights, especially the right of peoples to self-determination. The complex history of autonomy in Tsarist and Soviet Russia is considered, alongside the collapse of the USSR in 1991. An examination of Russia's plunge into the European human rights system under Yeltsin is followed by the history of the death penalty in Russia. Finally, the secrets of the ideology of 'sovereignty' in the Putin era and their impact on law and rights are revealed. Throughout, the constant theme is the centuries long hegemonic struggle between Westernisers and Slavophiles, against the backdrop of the Messianism that proclaimed Russia to be the Third Rome, was revived in the mission of Soviet Russia to change the world and which has echoes in contemporary Eurasianism and the ideology of sovereignty.

Chapter 1

Theorising Russia’s ideological history

In this chapter, I delve more deeply into two significant approaches to understanding Russia’s ideology and history, by Karl Marx and by Jeremy Lester and, from this basis, reflect on the perennial Russian conflict between Westernisers and Slovophiles and on Russia’s Messianism and, since the early twentieth century, Eurasianism.

Paradoxically, Karl Marx, who began with views consistent with those of the Westernisers, late in life taught himself Russian and corresponded with the Russian revolutionaries and formed views that are in some ways close to the Slavophiles. Early in his writing career, in 1851–52, Karl Marx (5 May 1818–14 March 1883) announced his deep hostility to the Russia Empire. In Revolution and counter-revolution or Germany in 1848, published as a book edited by his daughter Eleanor Aveling (Marx) in 1912, he referred to:

[T]he terrible reality of the Russian Empire; that empire which by every movement proclaims the pretension of considering all Europe as the domain of the Slavonic race, and especially of the only energetic part of this race, of the Russians; that empire which, with two capitals such as St. Petersburg and Moscow, has not yet found its centre of gravity, as long as the ‘City of the Czar’ [Constantinople, called in Russian Tzarigrad, the Czar’s city], considered by every Russian peasant as the true metropolis of his religion and his nation, is not actually the residence of its Emperor; that empire which, for the last one hundred and fifty years, has never lost, but always gained territory by every war it has commenced. And well known in Central Europe are the intrigues by which Russian policy supported the new-fangled system of Panslavism, a system than which none better could be invented to suit its purposes.¹

In 1856–57, when in his 30s, and following the end of the Crimean War (October 1853–February 1856), he wrote Revelations of the diplomatic history of the 18th Century, published in instalments in The Free Press from August 1856 to April 1857² These articles were edited by his daughter Eleanor and published after his death, in 1899, by Swan Sonnenschein in London. The title page of this edition carries ‘Opinions of the press’. The opinion of the Westminster Review (founded by Jeremy Bentham as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals and published from 1824 to 1914) was:

With all Marx’s faults and his extravagant abuse of high political personages, one cannot but admire the man’s strength of mind, the courage of his opinions, and the scorn and contempt for everything small, petty and mean. Although many and great changes have taken place since these papers appeared, they are still valuable not only for the elucidation of the past, but also for throwing a clearer light upon the present as also upon the future.

Marx’s target in the book was British connivance with Russia:

[A]t the time of the Empress Anna [ruled 1730 to 1740], England already betrayed her own allies to Russia, it will be seen from the pamphlets we are now about to reprint that, even before the epoch of Anna, at the very epoch of Russian ascendency in Europe, springing up at the time of Peter I, the plans of Russia were understood, and the connivance of British statesmen at these plans was denounced by English writers.³

Chapter IV presented a ‘general history of Russian politics’.⁴ For Marx, the ‘cradle of Muscovy’ was the ‘bloody mire of Mongolian slavery’, the ‘Tatar yoke’ which lasted from 1237 to 1462 – ‘a yoke not only crushing but dishonouring and withering the very soul of the people that fell its prey’.⁵ He identified the state policy of Muscovy, from Ivan Kalita (the moneybag, 1288–1340) who used tax money collected ostensibly for the Tatars to build his own possessions, to Ivan III (the Great, 1440–1505), who gathered the Russian lands and to Peter the Great, who gave Russia access to the sea, and nineteenth century Russia as ‘to encroach by the fraudulent use of a hostile power, to weaken that power by the very act of using it, and to overthrow it at last by the efforts produced through its own instrumentality’.⁶ He summed up his theory of Russia as follows:

It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emancipated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master. At length Peter the Great coupled the political craft of the Mongol slave with the proud aspiration of the Mongol master, to whom Genghis Khan had, by will, bequeathed his conquest of the earth.⁷

Peter the Great’s achievement was as follows:

It was but by the conversion of Muscovy from a country wholly of land into a sea-bordering empire, that the traditional limits of the Muscovite policy could be superseded and merged into that bold synthesis which, blending the encroaching method of the Mongol slave with the world-conquering tendencies of the Mongol master, forms the life-spring of modern Russian diplomacy.⁸

The conquest of the Baltic provinces, from Sweden, with their German aristocracy, gave him diplomats and generals, and a ‘crop of bureaucrats, schoolmasters and drill-sergeants, who were to drill Russians into that varnish of civilisation that adapts them to the technical appliances of the Western peoples without imbuing them with their ideas.’⁹ Avraham Yassour contends that:

In the 1850s Marx’ vision of Russian realities was that it was a ‘semi-Eastern’ society. He observed the following characteristic traits: the reign of a despotic potentate: scattered village communities; the absence of predominantly privately owned land; exploitation of the peasants’ communities by a bureaucratic, hierarchic apparatus, etc. His denomination of Russia as ‘semi-Asiatic’ was not a journalistic geographical metaphor: Russia seemed to be isolated from the socioeconomic dynamics of modernization exemplified in Western Europe. Russian autocrats – the Ivans and Peters – followed the Mongol pattern, structuring the evolving Russian Imperial-State into a pyramidal framework of centralized and militarized despotism.¹⁰

In his Late Marx and the Russian road: Marx and ‘the peripheries of capitalism’,¹¹ Teodor Shanin explored Marx’s later fascination with Russia, teaching himself Russian from 1870–71 and building a substantial library of Russian texts, including Flerovskiy and Chernishevskiy. The attraction of Russia to Marx was, as Shanin points out, ‘rich evidence concerning rural communes (“archaic” yet evidently alive in a world of capitalist triumphs) and of direct revolutionary experience, all encompassed by the theory and practice of Russian populism’.¹² Marx was taken to support the Populists, and his letters were suppressed by the Russian Marxists, Plekhanov and others, and the draft manuscripts were discovered in 1913 by D.B. Ryazanov and deciphered with the help of Nikolay Bukharin. However, they were not published until 1923.¹³

Marx himself initially denounced Russian Populism in a footnote to the first edition of Capital, but erased the footnote and added, in the postscript, a glowing tribute to Chernyshevskiy, author of What is to be done?, as the ‘great Russian scholar and critic’.¹⁴ In the French edition of Capital, he changed a passage in Chapter 26, ‘The secret of primitive accumulation,’ so as to imply that the English form of the expropriation of the peasants is applicable only to Western Europe or, to put it differently, Eastern Europe and Russia may follow a completely different path of evolution.¹⁵

In his famous reply to Vera Zasulich (1849–1919) of 8 March 1881,¹⁶ Marx emphasised that the expropriation of the agricultural producer, carried out in such a radical way in England, was ‘historically inevitable’ only in the countries of Western Europe. He continued:

In the Western case, then, one form of private property is transformed into another form of private property. In the case of the Russian peasants, however, their communal property would have to be transformed into private property.

The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source-material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it from all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.¹⁷

In other words, Marx was open to the idea that Russia might have its own path of non-capitalist development, through the elimination of the inroads already made by capital.

Marx’s four drafts of his letter to Vera Zasulich have been of great interest to Japanese scholars of Marx. Shizumu Hinada¹⁸ argued that:

Marx was able to and had to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1. Theorising Russia’s ideological history
• 2. The Scottish Enlightenment in the Russian Empire
• 3. The 1850s and 1860s in Russia: revolutionary situation or great reforms?
• 4. The trajectory of Yevgeniy Pashukanis and the struggle for power in Soviet law
• 5. Soviet international law and self-determination
• 6. The collapse of the USSR and the ‘parade of sovereignties’
• 7. Russian autonomy
• 8. Human rights in the Yeltsin period
• 9. Russia and the death penalty
• 10. Sovereign democracy
• Conclusion
• Autobiographical note
• References
• Index