ABSTRACT

Evgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis was at center stage in the development of Marxist law during the highly creative and challenging historical period of 1917–1937 in Russia. From 1924 to 1930, he assumed a number of important positions in the Soviet political and academic structure. These posts included membership in Piotr I. Stuchka's Section of Law and State and the Institute of Soviet Construction, as well as his tenure as head of the Subsection of the Institute of Soviet Construction on the General Theory of Law and State. By 1930, Pashukanis's influence was pronounced in legal circles, and his commodity-exchange theory of law was dominant in the law curriculum. From 1927 to the early 1930s, the exchange between Stuchka and Pashukanis was to persuade the latter that some of his early statements made in The General Theory of Law and Marxism should be qualified to include class dimensions in the overall analysis.