The rise and fall of a Soviet jurist : Evgeny Pashukanis and Stalinism

One question looms large in the early history of Soviet legal theory and practice: how and why did Evgeny Pashukanis emerge as the pre-eminent Soviet jurist from 1924 to 1930, come under only minor criticism from 1930 to 1936 and then be denounced and executed in 1937 as a “Trotskyite saboteur”? Of course, Pashukanis was not alone. Virtually every leading figure associated with the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union fell victim to Stalin’s purges by 1937 (from Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin to thousands of less-known socialists). Yet there are some particularly revealing aspects in the case of Pashukanis that have not been probed adequately by Western or Soviet writers.