SOVIET ATTITUDES TOWARD INTERNATIONAL LAW

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70B00338R000200040022-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2005
• Sequence Number: 22
• Content Type: REPORT

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Soviet Attitudes Toward International Law
The initial attitudes of the Soviet regime toward inter-
national law derived from Marxist theory and the events of
the period of revolution and civil war, 1917-1921. By Marxist
theory, international law was only a codification of the way
bourgeois states transacted business between each other and
a series of rules that imperialists used to enforce the
subjugation of colonies and semi-colonies.
In this period., the principal international obligation
of the Bolsheviks was to encourage world revolution. Inter-
national law had little to offer then in pursuit of that task.
As the initial hopes for mass uprisings faded, the Soviet
leaders were forced to deal with bourgeois states and con-
sequently with the problems of international law, but their
contempt for it as a body of doctrine regulating the relations
among states endured. They justified the abrogation of the
foreign debts of the Czarist government by claiming that the
Soviet Union was not a successor state. They demanded the
retrocession from Rumania of Bessarabia, where the Red
Army had never invaded and where there had been virtually
no pro-Communist movements by saying that as a successor
regime, the Soviet Union was entitled to all the Czar's
former provinces. In the war with Poland in 1920s the
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Bolsheviks not only claimed their invasion of Poland was
aimed at helping the Polish workers and peasants overthrow
the Pilsudski'government, they hoped to use the Red Army in
a drive'across Poland to assist the pro-communist forces
in Germany..
With the collapse of these ambitions and the necessity
of establishing peaceful relations with its neighbors, the
Soviet Union began to look more seriously at the nature and
the ut_= y of international law. But for many years the
doctri. tat international law is, at the. most, a convenience
in dealing with bourgeois states persisted. The right of
communists to use,any available means to spread the revolution
was made clear. P. I. Stuchka, the Commissioner of Justice
for the Russian Socialist Republic during . the. revolutionary
period and later a leading legal theoretician-and professor,
wrote in 1921,
. . we assign a relatively;-unimportant
sphere to international law . . . plans /That have7 emerged
concerning leagues of nations with special coercive authority,
and fantasies of that order /ossess7 absolutely no real
significance . . The Soviet form of state~;is per se an
international unification of mankind (or of a portion of
mankind). It is no less true that Soviet 'law has a direct
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tendency towards internationalism. And the authority
organized therefor upon an international scale is being
generated in the,Communist International." (P. I. Stuchka,
A General Doctrine of Law, Moscow, 1921.)
This doctrine was most fully developed by Evgeny
Pashukanis, Director of the Institute of Soviet Construction
and Law, and in 1936 Vice Commissioner: of Justice. (In 1936
Pashukanis,drafted,the new, more liberal law codes to conform
with t' -,~6 Constitution. On January 10, 1937 he was
arr(, and shot without trial.) ". . . economic and
political relationships between the state of the proletarian
dictatorship and a bourgeois state. . . are combined into a
form of international law. . . /'l5ecause7 the struggle of
the proletarian revolution . . . inevitably includes temporary
compromises." Pashukanis spelled out what he meant:by
"temporary compromises" by quoting Lenin: "The policies of
the revolutionary. class. which do not1know how to~carry through
'an adroit, maneuver, a tolerationist policy, and compromises'
so as to evade a battle known to be disadvantageous are good
for naught." (E. B. Pashukanis, Soviet State and Revolution
in Law, Moscow, 1930.) In 1935 Pashukanis published his
Essays on International Law, his last major,statement;on
the subject. Fundamentally, he maintained that international
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E.~.,__...+
law was not,`as some Soviet writers had alleged,'"the expression
of a common ideology, but on the contrary, an instrument in
the struggle between rival states, including those of differing
economic ahd-social'systems" (Soviet'Legal Theory,, by
Rudolf Schlesinger,"New York, 1945, p. 279).. Implicit in
all'of Pashukanis-' writings and',those of his followers was
the doctrine that' international law was binding on the Soviet
Union-:only so'long as it served Soviet purposes.' The only
morala authbr,ity in7 international affairs was dedication to
the{' ~unist revolution. Along with most of these communists
whbLgeftuinely believed in the revolution as the liberation
of.mankind:,'Pas,hukanis was killed during the purges. All
his doctrines on'-law were denounced, including that touching
on internationa l.law. In its place a doctrine on the dual
nature'of international law arose in Soviet theory. Its
purposewas-toreconcile the need of the Soviet State to
reassure other nations with which it was becoming involved
in trying to create,a bloc to resist Germany with the
theoretical demands-of Marxism-Leninism and its desire to
appear as the champion of-the oppressed to communists in
other countries.' .
,,,The new,doctrine accepted the~full obligations of
treaty'signatories, as binding in the USSR (in 1934 the USSR
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signed a treaty of. alliance with France and entered the
League of Nations), while at the same time proclaiming that
the Soviet Union would never enter agreements compromising
the rights of ,nations or reinforcing the rights of colonial
powers over their::-colonies. This, in essence, was the
differences the Soviets proclaimed between their view of
international: law and that of bourgeois states. Maxim
Litvinov,,then Soviet Foreign Commissar, stated that the
USSR would join agreements with other states provided::
" ly the-extensXon to every state belonging to such an
association of ,the, liberty to preserve. . . its state
personality and the,economic and social system chosen by it--
in other words,. reciprocal non-interference in the domestic
affairs of the states therein associated--and, secondly, the
existence of common, aims." (Litvinov's grandson, Pavel, has
just~been sentenced to exile in Siberia for.defending
Czechoslovakia's right to "the economic and social system
chosen by it.,")
-After the.Second World War, the Soviet Union entered
into numerous international agreements that bound it to
observe the commonly accepted customs and obligations of
international law. The doctrine of the dual aspects; of
internat.ional.law became more and more muted in practice,
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although in theory it acquired a new extention, socialist
international-law,. which applies in the relations among the
countries of "The Socialist Commonwealth." These relations
differ from those among nations with different social
systems because of the "various forms of cooperation on the
basis of.:equalrights;and in the absence of mutual conflict.
International cooperation of the USSR and the countries of
peoples'democracy follows the generous aims of guaranteeing
general:,peace, real freedom and independence of peoples and
s'`daittl :.''.' (Big Soviet Encyclopedia, - vol .. 27, p. 23.)
line has been expounded in detail in a?recent work
by"A:'-P. Butenko, a doctor of philosophy of the Soviet
Academy=of Sciences, the most prestigious scholarly
organization in the Soviet Union. Dr. Butenko's The World
Socialist System and Anti-Communism is dedicated to the
refutation of the:thesis that the Soviet Union has imposed
an-imperial system in Eastern Europe. It was published
on:April 30, 1968. Since Czechoslovakia and the Kovalev
article, Dr. Butenko may have suffered the same fate that
Pashukanis met in.1937. If he has not, heand the Academy
of Sciences should explain how the thesis of his book can
be reconciled. With recent events. Among significant passages from
his book are the following:
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"Bourgeois ideologues deliberately distort the
objective basis of the tendency toward independent
development of,the socialist states, utilizing the
myth of., the threat of imperialist domination,
citing the fear of a number of countries that they
will be>devoured by the Soviet Union." (p. 34)
"Under socialism the social structure created
within :the national borders of one or another state
conditions the objective possibility of the
,amicable solution of non-antagonistic collisions
'between the socialist countries, the possibility
of the deepening and expanding of collaboration.
In the countries of socialism national liberation
has been achieved (the national state, the economy,
and the culture are being developed)." (p. 36)
."But from the international character of
socialism does not at all follow the necessity'of
the political leadership by one state of the others,
and a fortiori the dominating authoritarian position
of one or another state in the world system, as the
ideologues of anti-communism attempt to assert."
(p? 46)?
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"Within the world socialist system the principle
of respect for state sovereignty presupposes the
supreme rights of the socialist nations to dispose of
all of-the natural, economic, and human resources
within the limits of the state borders; the indisputable
right of each people independently to decide the
fate of:their country. . ." (p. 89)
"Anti-communists are not capable of understanding
that the sovereignty of the socialist nations consists
not in the right to make war upon one another, but in
the right.-independently to create a new social
structure. ."(p. 100)
"And this means that sovereignty / fthe socialist
states7?is now linked not to the right of destruction,
war, but to.the right of each people to make a
creative contribution to the common cause of the
communist transformation of the world, that the recourse
to military force is not characteristic of the mutual
relationsr.of the socialist states." (p. 100)
"And this in its turn presupposes the conclusion
that,within the framework of the world socialist
system in its contemporary state of equalization of
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the levels of the individual countries such a .
center cannot exist (a center of domination of the world
communist movement in any one country). If any ..
socialist country would attempt to claim such a: role
at present, such an aspiration would inevitably
,,a.ve a hegemonical, great-power, nationalistic, and
:::objective character alien to socialism." (p. 117)
"Socialist states are advocates of non-intervention
.n the internal affairs of one another, they respect
ie laws and traditions of the fraternal countries,
and consider impermissible the utilization of any
means of economic, political, and military pressure
in their mutual relations, they fight against permitting
any acts in inter-state relations designed to discredit
or replace the composition of the party and state organs
which the people have entrusted with the administration
of the country." (p. 148)
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