Yevgeny Bronislavowitsch Paschukanis

Evgeny Pashukanis ( Russian Евгений Брониславович Пашуканис ., Scientific transliteration Yevgeny Bronislavovič Pašukanis * 23. February 1891 in Staritsa , Tver province , † 4. September 1937 ) was a Soviet lawyer and Marxist philosopher of law .

Life

At the age of 16 he was already involved in the central committee of the social democratic student and working-class youth in Petersburg . In 1909 Paschukanis began studying law in Petersburg. The Tsarist police arrested Pashukanis for his political activities and ordered him to leave Russia. He traveled to Germany and continued his studies at the law faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

During the First World War , Pashukanis stayed in Russia and took part in the Bolsheviks' protest against the war. After the October Revolution he was briefly a judge at one of the newly established people's courts, and in 1918 he joined the newly founded Communist Party of Russia / Bolsheviks .

Together with Pyotr Iwanowitsch Stutschka (1865-1932) Paschukanis founded in 1922 within the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences (later renamed the Communist Academy of Social Sciences) the Section for General Theory of State and Law. At the same time he worked in the Foreign Ministry in 1920 as Deputy Head of the Economics and Law Department and was also a consultant in the USSR Representation in Berlin from 1921 to 1923.

He and Stutschka created a three-volume encyclopedia on state and law (1925–1927) and published the journal Revolution des Rechts . Paschukanis was also a member of several magazine editors. In 1927 he became a full member and vice-president of the Communist Academy, and in 1931 director of the Institute for Soviet Construction and Soviet Law there. In 1936 he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar for Justice of the USSR. As part of a constitutional commission, he worked on the Soviet constitution of 1936 .

Paschukanis' school, known in the USA as the "Commodity Exchange School" (of law), shaped Soviet legal theory until the late 1920s, and represented Marxist legal theory beyond the Soviet Union. Under Stalin's rule , Paschukanis was able to maintain his functions and prominent position in Soviet legal science until his arrest during the Great Terror . However, he had to revoke the earlier theorems of the withering away of the state under communism, and of the impossibility of a proletarian or socialist right. After defamation he was arrested on January 20, 1937. On September 4, 1937, Paschukanis was charged by the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR with membership in a counterrevolutionary terrorist group and sentenced to death by shooting in an accelerated trial. The sentence was carried out on the same day. His remains were buried in the Donskoy cemetery .

Pashukanis was rehabilitated on March 31, 1956 by the Military Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian SFSR . In the course of the debate on the derivation of the state , which was held in the German-speaking countries in the 1970s , his work gained new relevance.

Works

• General doctrine of law and Marxism Attempt to criticize basic legal concepts . Publishing house for literature and politics, Vienna 1929.
  • General Legal Doctrine and Marxism. With a review by Karl Korsch . (= Archive of Socialist Literature. Volume 3). New Critique Publishing House , Frankfurt am Main 1966
  • General legal theory and Marxism, attempt at a critique of basic legal concepts. 1923. (Reprint of the first German edition from 1929, edited and with an appendix by Hermann Klenner and L. Mamut, Berlin / Freiburg 1991)
  • General Legal Doctrine and Marxism. Attempt to criticize basic legal terms . With a foreword by Alex Gruber and Tobias Ofenbauer and a biographical note by Tanja Walloschke. Ça Ira, Freiburg im Breisgau 2003, ISBN 3-924627-79-7 .
• Outlines of International Law . With a foreword by Theodor Schweisfurth. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1971. (Russian first edition 1935)

literature

• WG legal criticism (ed.): Legal and state criticism according to Marx and Paschukanis. Bertz + Fischer, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86505-802-7 .
• Andreas Harms: Form of goods and legal form: On the legal theory of Eugen Paschukanis. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2000, ISBN 3-7890-6783-0 .
• Norbert Reich : Pašukanis, Evgenij Bronislavovič. In: Michael Stolleis (Ed.): Juristen. A biographical lexicon. From antiquity to the 20th century . CH Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39330-6 , pp. 475-477.
• Ingo Elbe : form of goods, legal form, form of government. Paschukanis' explication of legal and political theory contents of Marx's economic criticism. In: Grundrisse. 9, 2004.
• Carlo Di Mascio. Pašukanis e la critica marxista del diritto borghese , Firenze, Phasar Edizioni, 2013. ISBN 978-88-6358-227-7 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Yevgeny Bronislawowitsch Paschukanis in the catalog of the German National Library
• Marxists.org : Evgeny B. Pashukanis Archive (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Article on Paschukanis in the "Open List" - a listing of the victims of political repression in the Soviet Union 1917-1991 (Russian)
2. ↑ List of those buried in the Donskoy cemetery (Russian)