ABSTRACT
Disputes arise in all societies. The question for students of politics is how they are resolved. In modern Western history competing claims have been reconciled through three public mechanisms: the market, representative institutions, and the courts. Elaborate arrangements emerged to parcel out conflicts among these three arenas and to decide disputes within each. Not so in the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 rejected the Western model of a plurality of remedies in favor of an administered society where the power to resolve disputes was concentrated in the hands of party and Government functionaries. In such a system, courts developed as little more than appendages of executive power. 1
