ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the doctrines and functions of the Soviet civil state. It analyses the significance and fortunes of the theory of the civil state, two defining moments and two defining exponents. Although spanning only the first two Soviet decades, they arguably encapsulate the whole course of Soviet legal theory, from critique of ideology to ideology. Pashukanis is offered as stand-in for his entire first generation of fellow revolutionary jurists, engaged in a collaborative-agnostic endeavour to elaborate a properly Marxist theory of law for the first time. In comparison Vyshinksy was a hack and a theoretical midget, but he stands as the authoritative legal ideologue who fixed the parameters of Soviet civil legal discourse for the ensuing five decades. The Soviet persistence in employing the terms bourgeois law and bourgeois society was part and parcel of the Soviet insistence that only the USSR had in fact crossed the threshold into the twentieth century, in economic, political or legal-institutional terms.
