ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the Soviet relationship to international law, aiming to understand if the legal form offered any limits to potential revolutionary legal praxis. Soviet actors considered themselves to be revolutionaries. Soviet foreign policy was shaped around these realities, and the reception of both the new Soviet state and reactions to these policies were similarly influenced by other European reactions to the possibility of revolutionary contagion. The context outside of the revolutionary state was also highly combustible. This revolutionary context was accompanied by new articulations of legal theory. Soviet legal scholars noted that it was only in the wake of the Soviet revolution that the first Marxist theories of law were articulated. A more important insight arises from the consideration of the possibility of revolutionary praxis within international law. Early Soviet policy was oriented towards immediate survival, tactical manoeuvring within Europe and the immediate propagation of socialist revolution abroad.
