Právnohistorická literatúra v ZSSR v rokoch 1917 – 1939

The article reviews the development of literature on legal history in the Soviet Union, produced after the October Revolution and based on Marxist-Leninist tenets. The author used some materials from the 1978 Soviet monograph “Soviet Legal History” as well as her own bibliographical notes from her study of bibliographical records in the library of the Moscow Institute of Government and Law of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Her article covers the period 1917–1939. In her work the author concentrated on literature in the field of legal history covering the pre-Soviet era rather than on study of the history of the Soviet state and law and the general history of government and law. Her main motivation was to point out the important fact that even in the most difficult period for the fledgling Soviet state, Soviet historians and authors specializing in the history of law did not lose their interest in the development stages of the Russian state from its very founding, and that they equally initiated the study of the same problems with respect to the other nations making up the Soviet Union. The article has an introduction and two parts. In the first part the author discusses the development of literature on legal history in Russia, while she devotes the second part to the same literature produced by the other nations of the Soviet Union. Proceeding from a study of published literature on legal history, the author points out that as early as the 1920s, creative discussion began to grow and the first monographs were published on the problems of the individual development stages of absolutism, its legal system, the 19th century reforms and the 1905–1907 revolutions. In the mid-1930s, Soviet authors began to apply the materials they had collected in discussing from Marxist-Leninist positions the individual problems of the history of government and law of pre-revolutionary Russia. Two factors were important in the development of literature on the legal history of the other Soviet nations, namely the transition of scholars to Marxist-Leninist tenets in those nations, which had their own scientific capacity, and the elaboration of legal history problems by Russian scholars in the case of those nations, which had only begun to form their own intelligentsia. The study of development of literature on legal history over the relatively brief period of two decades underlines the pronounced effort by Soviet scholars to place Soviet science, including legal history, on a firm Marxist-Leninist basis. In view of the obstacles encountered by the young Soviet state, it is also important to note the great effort made by Soviet legal historians in the post-revolutionary period to promote the new, socialist science of government and law.