ABSTRACT
German legal idealism was also influential in prerevolutionary Russian jurisprudence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The individual denied that he was violating the law, invoking in his defense individual rights guaranteed under the Soviet Constitution. The problem in focusing on individual rights in the Soviet Union is that, given the pace of events, no one could be certain of what the USSR Constitution was at any particular moment in time. “Justice” then in the universe of perestroika implied the fusion of newly conferred political and civil rights with long-held economic and social rights. The mindset of official contra-individualism was apparent at the dawn of Soviet parliamentary democracy in the spring of 1989. The Democratic Union, a coalition of former dissidents which announced its opposition to the Communist Party before that became commonplace, consistently had its rallies broken up and demonstrations dispersed throughout the Soviet Union.
